Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/272

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The reader will have gathered from this and the two preceding chapters an idea of the extraordinary conditions under which man lived in Europe in the Pleistocene age. There is no trace of the knowledge of pottery or of spinning, nor at this time were domestic animals or cultivated seeds or fruits known in our quarter of the world. The Palæolithic tribes led a wandering feral life under feral conditions, and had not learned the arts of moulding plants and animals to their various needs, and thus freeing themselves to some extent from bondage to their natural conditions. The reader has seen, further, that man appears in two phases of the hunter stage of human progress—the older and lower, or that of the River-drift, and the newer and higher, or that of the Cave-men. The River-drift man was a hunter of a very low order, but not lower than the modern Australian, and from his wide range over the Old World was probably of vastly greater antiquity than his successors in Europe. There is no reason for the belief that he possessed any artistic skill. The Cave-man, on the other hand, possessed a singular talent for representing the animals he hunted, and his sketches reveal to us that he had a capacity for seeing the beauty and grace of natural form not much inferior to that which is the result of long-continued civilisation in ourselves, and very much higher than that of his successors in Europe in the Neolithic age. The hunter who was both artist and sculptor, who reproduced with his imperfect means at one time foliage (Fig. 91), and at another the quiet repose of a reindeer feeding (Fig. 86), has left behind the proof of a decided advance