Page:Palæolithic Man and Terramara Settlements in Europe.djvu/264

204 disclose a gradual evolution in workmanship, but, strange to say, there is among them scarcely a single specimen that can be called a weapon a fact which suggests that it was only after the inhabitants became troglodytes that they took to hunting the big game which entered Central Europe during the advent of a colder climate. The technique displayed in the manufacture of the coup-de-poing indicates great progress in manipulative skill since man first took to using external objects as ornaments, tools, and weapons of offence and defence. At first these would be hardly distinguishable from natural objects pebbles and sticks picked up at random on account of their suitability as hammers and clubs. Between the "eolith" and the coup-de-poing there is a "hiatus" which has to be filled up by intermediate forms and phases of workmanship the products of a manipulating hand guided by intelligence. If eoliths are to be accepted as the deliberately shaped tools of earlier races there is no objection to, or improbability in, dating them to a very remote period, even to preglacial times. Among the more noted investigators in this department of research may be mentioned the Abbé Bourgeois, who, in 1867, discovered eoliths in the upper Oligocene beds near Thenay (Loir et Cher) ; M. J. B. Rames, who first detected them in the upper Miocene beds of Puy Courny (Cantal) ; and MM. Munck and Rutot, who profess to have unearthed the Eolithic industry in the middle Oligocene of Belgium. Many other anthropologists are busy in this obscure field of research. But we cannot pause to look into these interesting discoveries, as we have still more important problems ahead, which, being nearer our own times, have more human interest to us than these very remote speculations.

M. Boule, the distinguished Professor of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum in Paris, makes the Moustérien the first, or lowest, of three epochs into which he divides the upper Quaternary deposits. This mode of classifying the remains of the Palæolithic races of Europe is, to my mind, the best standpoint from which to discuss the evidence of their cultural attainments. Before the Moustérien epoch,