56 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 
coveries of the Cromagnon race have been made. Mean- 
time, we simply note that, although in dimensions — in 
stature and in size of body — these Cromagnon people far 
outstrip the river-bed type of Neolithic period, and 
probably also of the Palaeolithic period, the two types are 
not radically different. To me, they seem to represent 
the " longs " and the " shorts " derived from a common 
stock. 
At all those sites, at Paviland, Kent's Cavern, Engis, 
Aurignac, and Cromagnon, the discoverers of man's early 
history stumbled across a stage in human evolution which 
was manifestly older than the Neolithic phase ; but how 
much more ancient they could not then tell. That 
secret they soon set out to discover. When the skeletons 
were found at Cromagnon (1868), it was becoming 
apparent to the explorers of the French caves that the 
Palaeolithic period, into which they had forced a way, had 
seen the dawn and the close of many phases of human 
culture, and that, in the floors of the caves, there was 
clear evidence that these phases passed in an orderly 
succession. It became clear to them that, as in historical 
times, a new form of culture gradually arose, and as 
gradually replaced the older modes of life. Hence we 
find, from this time forwards, that the investigators of 
France bent all their efforts to distinguish the various 
cultures represented in the caves, and to establish the 
order of their succession. As early as 1869, M. Gabriel 
de Mortillet^ elaborated an orderly classification of the 
cave cultures ; but the exact position represented by the 
culture of the caves at Aurignac and at Cromagnon was 
not finally settled until 1905, when the Abbe Breuil 
finally proved that at least two periods of culture, the 
ySolutrean and the Magdalenian, intervene between it 
and the dawn of the Neolithic period.^ During those 
intervening periods, the climate of Europe changed ; the 
1 See Miiscc prchistorique^ by G. and A. de Mortillet, 1903. 
2 See Bibliography of the Abbe Breuil's researches from 1 899-1 910, 
pubhshed at Fribourg, Switzerland, 1910. His more recent publications 
will be found in full or in abstract in that .excellent periodical 
VAnihropologie. 
