DISCOVERY OF PRE-NEOLITHIC MAN 53 
cover the little terrace in front of the cave. Under the 
floor of the terrace he found abundance of charcoal and 
remains of hearths. Embedded in the debris of the 
floor he found implements and ornaments of that form 
of human culture which is now known as Aurignacian — 
the same culture as was exposed at Paviland and at 
Engis, The flint implements of all three caves were 
worked in the same style — in all there were the same 
carvings in ivory, the same ornaments, necklaces of 
shells and perforated teeth, the same kind of barbed 
implements in bone, antlers of reindeer, and in ivory. 
When we consider that the culture of the people on 
the South Welsh coast was the same as that at the 
northern foot of the Pyrenees, we begin to realise that 
already in the Pleistocene period — when animals now 
extinct abounded in Europe — interchange and intercom- 
munication had already made Europeans sharers in a 
common culture. Lartet also found amongst the undis- 
turbed debris in the floor of the cave, fragments of 
human bones — not enough to tell us what kind of 
men these ancient Aurignacians were, but sufficient to 
indicate their bodily presence. It was the discovery at 
Aurignac that convinced Sir Charles Lyell that man 
went beyond the Neolithic horizon, and with his con- 
version, the new conception of man's antiquity made 
rapid progress. 
Eight years later, in i868,JM. Louis Lartet discovered 
the actual men of the Aurignacian culture. The scene 
of the discovery is not in the region of the Garonne, but 
in the watershed of a companion river, the Dordogne, 
which, rising in southern central France, joins the Garonne 
at Bordeaux (see fig. 38, p. 109). The Vezere is a northern 
tributary of the Dordogne. The caves and rock-shelters 
in the cliff^s which border the Vezere have yielded some 
of the most important and most complete records of 
ancient man. In 1868, when a railway was being made 
along the lower part of the valley of the Vezere to unite 
the town of Perigueux with the main line along the 
Dordogne valley, an old rock -shelter was opened at 
