20 PREHISTORIC EUROPE. 



abode — and for this purpose caves would be well suited. But 

 if the climate were severe — the summer being short and the 

 winter prolonged — then of course a permanent dwelling-place 

 would be more necessary. And it is evident from various 

 circumstances that the artistic tribes, at all events, occupied 

 caves as regular places of abode all the year round, issuing from 

 them on hunting expeditions, and returning to them to feast 

 upon the spoils. In bad weather they probably stayed at home 

 and occupied their time in the manufacture of implements, as 

 we may infer from the frequent presence in the cave-accumula- 

 tions of numerous flint flakes, cores, and chips, and imperfect or 

 unfinished tools. But the artistic folk sometimes at least 

 wandered far afield. This is shown by the drawings of seals and 

 a large cetacean which have been discovered in certain Pyrenean 

 caves, and by the presence in the same caves of sea-shells, some 

 of which have come from the Atlantic coast and others from 

 the Mediterranean. We may therefore be quite sure that the 

 Palaeolithic reindeer-hunters occasionally visited the sea-shore, 

 or carried on a kind of traffic with coast-dwellers. 



Of the people themselves we know comparatively little, for 

 very few skulls and skeletons have been preserved. Prom this 

 circumstance it has been supposed by some that Palaeolithic 

 man did not pay much respect to his dead — an inference which, 

 whether true or the reverse, is certainly not entirely proved by 

 the evidence. Por, even if burial had been a common custom 

 among the Palaeolithic tribes, so many changes have taken place 

 since their disappearance — the surface of the ground has been 

 so greatly remodelled by the action of frost, rain, and running- 

 water — that we could hardly expect now to meet with any trace 

 of their remains, or the graves in which these may have been 

 laid. The only places where bones or complete skeletons are 

 likely to have been occasionally preserved are caves and lake- 

 and river-deposits. But caves, as we have seen, were in request 

 as dwelling-places, and it is only such as were unfitted for this 

 purpose that would possibly be used for interments. Again, as 

 man would naturally be more wary than the animals by which 



