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Updated: June 17, 2025
It would not be paradoxical to regard the social life and developing speech of Magdalenian man as the chief cause of the rapid advance toward civilisation which will follow in the next period. And it is not without interest to notice that a fall in the temperature of the earth is the immediate cause of this social life. The building of homes of any kind seems to be unknown to Magdalenian man.
The interpretation of these is obscure and doubtful. We cannot doubt, however, that articulate speech would be rapidly evolved in the social life of the later Magdalenian period, and the importance of this acquisition can hardly be exaggerated. Imagine even a modern community without the device of articulate language.
The same may be said of another fundamental advance of the men of the later Palaeolithic age, the discovery of the art of making fire. It coincides with the oncoming of the cold, either in the Mousterian or the Magdalenian. It was more probably a chance discovery than an invention.
This Palaeolithic race seemed to come to a mysterious end, and Europe was then invaded by the higher Neolithic race. England was probably detached from the Continent about the end of the Magdalenian period. It was thought that some great devastation the last ice-sheet, a submersion of the land, or a plague then set in, and men were unable to retreat south.
It is, however, a clearly established and outstanding fact that the characteristic art of Magdalenian man comes to an abrupt and complete close, and it does not seem possible to explain this without supposing that the old race was destroyed or displaced.
Whatever may have been earlier man's power of expression, the closer social life of the Magdalenian period would lead to a great development of it. Some writers go so far as to suggest that certain obscure marks painted on pebbles or drawn on the cavern-walls by men at the close of the Palaeolithic Age may represent a beginning of written language, or numbers, or conventional signs.
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