DISCOVERY OF PRE-NEOLITHIC MAN 6i 
the present surface. This, the " equine " layer, varying in 
thickness from 15 to 20 inches, was made up of bones of 
horses, broken, cut, and charred, mixed up with the 
debris which accumulate on and around the hearths of 
ancient man. The implements of flint and of bone, the 
ornaments, the works of art, the remains of extinct 
animals, found in the equine layer, are those which 
occurred at Aurignac. The equine layer represents a 
vast kitchen-midden of man during the Aurignacian 
period. It has been calculated that the colony at Solutre 
had consumed at least one hundred thousand horses in 
their time. Beneath the equine stratum one — occasionally 
two — older Aurignacian floors, marked by extensive 
hearths, were found (fig. 25). In the deepest of these, 
implements which characterise a still older Palaeolithic 
culture were found — imiplements of the Mousterian type. 
Above the equine layer, there is a stratum or ancient 
floor yielding abundant evidence of a more recent 
culture, the culture which succeeded the Aurignacian, and 
which has been named, because of its discovery here, 
" Solutrean." A form of finely worked flint implement 
— shaped like a laurel leaf — appears for the first time in 
this culture. Certain animals of the Aurignacian period 
were dying out ; reindeer were becoming more abundant. 
Art, we know from discoveries elsewhere, was reaching a 
higher standard. In the Solutrean period, Solutre itself 
ceased to be a site of habitation, for it shows no trace of 
the men of the succeeding Magdalenian period which we 
saw at Mas d'Azil. The land surface had reached its 
present level when people of the Neolithic and subsequent 
ages buried their dead over strata containing the remains 
of two long Palaeolithic periods. 
It will be noticed that the cave strata at Mas d'Azil 
take up the story of ancient man where the deposits at 
Solutre leave ofi'. In the 60 feet of strata, represented 
at the combined sites, are found the cultures of four con- 
secutive periods — Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, 
and Azilian, with superficial traces of the Neolithic period. 
It is plain that we have made a long journey into the past 
