REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I913 



151 



It is a remarkable fact that this morphologic hiatus coincides 

 with a culture hiatus, as has been strongly insisted on by the Abbe 

 Breuil. Homo neanderthalensis had an extremely rudi- 

 mentary industry in which nothing of the slighest esthetic tendency 

 has revealed itself. On the contrary, the man of the Upper Pleisto- 

 cene possessed very varied culture ; with equal skill he worked in 

 stone, reindeer antlers and bone, and finally and especially he ap- 

 pears to have been a marvelous artist whose multiple productions in 

 sculpture, engravings, designs and paintings are often veritable 

 chefs d'oeuvre. 



Far from finding a satisfactory term of passage between the 

 cranium of La Chapelle-aux-Saints and the crania of Grimaldi or 



Magdalenian painting from the cave of Altamira 



Cro-Magnon, one finds no transition between the fragmentary Mous- 

 terian civilization and the admirable cultures of the Aurignacian, 

 Solutrian and Magdalenian man. In order to concede any relation 

 between these types or between these industries, it is necessary to 

 suppose that at the end of the Middle Pleistocene a mutation was 

 produced which abruptly transformed Homo neander- 

 thalensis into Homo sapiens. Need I say that this 

 hypothesis can no more be seriously entertained than the 

 creationist hypothesis? In reality this morphologic and industrial 

 hiatus simply proves that living man, like the man of the Upper 

 Pleistocene of which he is the issue, was not the direct descendant of 

 Homo neanderthalensis; that the latter represents a 



