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Updated: June 17, 2025
The Eskimo, whether they are the survivors of the Magdalenian race or a regiment thrown off the Asiatic army as it entered America, remain at the primitive level. The American peoples in turn accord with this view.
They must have married-in somewhat closely, one would think, for this special aptitude to have blossomed forth so luxuriantly. I cannot here dwell at length on the triumphs of Aurignacian and Magdalenian artistry. Indeed, what I have seen with my own eyes on the walls of certain French caves is almost too wonderful to be described.
While Europe was shivering in the last stage of the Ice-Age, and the mammoth and reindeer browsed in the snows down to the south of France, this region would enjoy an excellent climate and a productive soil. We may confidently assume that there was a large and stirring population of human beings on it during the Magdalenian cold.
We are still very far from civilisation, but the few tens of thousands of years that separate Magdalenian man from it will be traversed with relative speed though, we should always remember, with a speed far less than the pace at which man is advancing to-day. A new principle now enters into play: a specifically human law of evolution is formulated.
Lord Avebury reproduces an Eskimo drawing, or picture-message, in his "Prehistoric Times," to which it would be difficult to find a parallel in Magdalenian remains. I do not mean that the art is superior, but the complex life represented on the picture-message, and the intelligence with which it is represented, are beyond anything that we know of Palaeolithic man.
Sages will be interested to learn that Professor Koken, of Tuebingen, in a learned pamphlet, lays it down that these flints of Gafsa belong to the Mesvinian, Strepyian, Praechellean to say nothing of the Mousterian, Aurignacian, Solutrean, Magdalenian, and other types. So be it.
Artistic skill, the use of clothing and fire, and a finer feeling in the shaping of weapons and implements, are the highest certain indications of the progress made by the end of the Old Stone Age. But there was probably an advance made which we do not find recorded, or only equivocally recorded, in the memorials of the age. Speech was probably the greatest invention of Magdalenian man.
The cold increases as we pass to the last part of the Old Stone Age, the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods; and nothing is clearer than that the pace of development increases at the same time. Short as the period is, in comparison with the preceding, it witnesses a far greater advance than had been made in all the rest of the Old Stone Age.
In other places we find the ashes of the fires round which he squatted, often associated with the bones of the wild horses, deer, etc., on which he lived. But the most remarkable indication of progress in the "cave-man" is his artistic skill. Exaggerated conclusions are sometimes drawn from the statuettes, carvings, and drawings which we find among the remains of Magdalenian life.
This region had been the great centre of the Magdalenian culture. Its large frescoed caverns exhibit the culmination of the Old Stone life, and afford many connecting links with the new.
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