ATLANTIC LEGEND 67 



sculpture of bulls, bison, and deer that have been preserved to 

 this day in the caves of the Dordogne and in Spain. 



It is believed that the Cro-Magnon preoccupation for de- 

 picting cow^s and bulls sprang from certain religious ceremo- 

 nies not unlike those of the later Minoan culture in Crete. 

 Also these early Cro-Magnons and their successors believed in 

 female witchcraft, and made drawings of women as priestesses 

 or witches, with peaked caps and broomsticks. 



Now the analogy which the Atlantean protagonists draw 

 from this is that the spear-thrower and this particular form of 

 witchcraft is also found along the western shores of Africa and 

 in Central America, whereas the Mongolian forms of witch- 

 craft in most other sections of America are apparently derived 

 from male Shamanism. Likewise the practice of the couvade, 

 where the father of a child takes to bed and is treated as if he 

 had suffered the pangs and disabilities of childbirth, have been 

 found, even to this day, in the Basque country, North Africa, 

 and in Central America, and also in the Canary Islands. Arche- 

 ologists add later evidence from the Solutrian period. This 

 racial migration, dated about 20,000 B.C., is supposed to have 

 come north from Africa into Spain and southern France by a 

 land bridge at Gibraltar or at Sicily. These people made special 

 flints of great delicacy, by pressure rather than chipping, which 

 have been found also in North America in the Gulf of Mexico 

 area; just as recent finds of early skulls in Texas and Florida 

 have been more like the Cro-Magnon type than the Mon- 

 golian. 



The biologists can add to this kind of evidence certain types 

 of plant life that are found in western Europe and eastern 

 America and on the Canaries and Azores, just as they can 

 point out certain similarly distributed land snails and small 

 animals. This does not specifically prove that this spread of 

 culture, human types, and plant and animal life had to come 

 from a common source inside the radius of this limited dis- 



