Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/463

Rh less prosperous districts. Lying mainly south of the dwarfed areas of Limousin, they are intermediate between its miserable people and their taller neighbors in the vine country about Bordeaux. Let it be clearly understood that they are not a degenerate type at all. The peasants are keen and alert; often contrasting favorably with the rather heavy-minded Alpine type about them.

The people we have described above agree in physical characteristics with but one other type of men known to anthropologists. This is the celebrated Cro-Magnon race, long ago identified by archaeologists as having inhabited the southwest of Europe in prehistoric times. As early as 1858 human remains began to be discovered by Lartet and others in this region. Workmen on a railway in the valley of the Vézère, shown on our map, unearthed near the little village of Les Eyziès the complete skeletons of six individuals—three men, two women, and a child. This was the celebrated cave of Cro-Magnon. In the next few years many other similar archæological discoveries in the same neighborhood were made. A peasant in the upper Garonne Valley, near Saint-Gaudens, found a large human bone in a rabbit hole. On excavating, the remains of seventeen individuals were found

buried together in the cave of Aurignac. At Laugerie Basse, again in the Vézère Valley, a rich find was made. In the cave of Baumes-Chaudes, just across in Lozère, thirty-five human crania with portions of skeletons were unearthed. These were the classical discoveries; the evidence of their remains has been completely verified since then from all over Europe. In no district, however, are the relics of this type so plentiful as here in