Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/648

 amelioration of climate, retreat of the glaciers, and consequent moving northward of the reindeer, the conditions of existence materially changed. It is maintained by some naturalists that the man of Cro-Magnon followed the reindeer north, that the settlements remained for a long time uninhabited, and that the man who made the polished flint implements is another and distinct race—neolithic man, the earliest man of the present period. On the other hand, it is held that the polished flint race is but a development of the Cro-Magnon. In support of this it is claimed that in the upper levels of a rock shelter at Sorde, in the department of the Basses-Pyrénées, human bones of the Cro-Magnon type and cut flints were found, but with them a narrow, thin



blade and a triangular dagger, which are very similar to the finest productions of the neolithic age. The most plausible conclusion would seem to be that many, but not all, of the Cro-Magnon men followed the reindeer and retreating ice northward, and that those remaining amalgamated with the neolithic immigrants, accepting in a measure their industries; thus we have the mixtures of the implements of palæolithic and neolithic man.

The most recent of the races of fossil man have been grouped by MM. Quatrefages and Hami under the name of the Furfooz race, from Furfooz in the valley of the Lesse, Belgium; here a complete station, comprising a grotto where they lived and a burial grotto, was found. As before mentioned, a race allied to this is found in the Grenelle basin near Paris. Grouping on craniological characters, and considering a head found at La Touchère in a bank of the Seille as an allied form, we have in this group