The cave man was not satisfied with these line drawings vivid and expressive as they are. He wanted to reproduce the colors of the ani mals as he saw them and succeeded in doing so. At first he used only the reds and browns, but after a while also the yellows and many shades of colors. His color sense was evidently ex actly like ours and he reproduced the animals as he saw them. The reason why his colors lasted so well during all these years is that they were ground in oil. This inventor of oil paint ing has made sonic of the most vivid pictures of animals that have ever been made. He pic tures them in all positions, standing, lying down, in all kinds of movement and at bay. He even took advantage of certain somewhat rounded projections of the walls of his cave home to fit his pictures of animals to these surfaces in relief in such a way as to give the impression of plastic work. His power to accommodate his painting to the cramped conditions necessary for this, show what fine command he had over his artistic powers. The men who did this work far from being close to the beasts are quite as high as the men of our time, indeed if anything on the average higher. It is not at all surprising to find that they were magnifi cently developed and had a skull a little larger than the average of the men of our time.
These pictures were often made on the cave walls at such a distance from the entrance that the darkness was complete. Just what kind of light the cave man used has not been found. It was not torches, for there are no marks of smoke on the walls or ceiling. Sir Arthur Evans, who was president of the British Asso ciation for The Advancement of Science, did not hesitate to say in 1916 in his presidential address that the cave man had probably discov ered some mode of lighting his cave, or other wise he would not have been able to do the painting that is actually found there. It would not be surprising if the inventor of painting in oils should have made other inventions. He used fire in many ways and fire is, after all, one of man's greatest inventions.
The savage cave man of theory then so close to the beasts gives place when his actual re mains are critically appreciated to a man the equal of any in the history of the race. An artist is at all times the flower of our civilization and evidently many of the cave men were ar tists. Further discoveries give indications of rather happy domestic life, his wife being pic tured as rounded and fat though the cave man himself is muscular and athletic, evidently fitted for the difficult task of hunting the animals. Had his wife been the slave that she is pic tured in theory she would not have been any thing like the portraits that we have of her. There are manifest signs in some of the draw ings of her liking for dress and already in vari ous places there are various fashions with longer and shorter skirts and higher and lower corsages and ribbons and other adjuncts of fashion (Sir Arthur Evans). Above all the cave man carefully buried his dead with some of their weapons and utensils near them and with other evident indications of his belief that death was not the end of life, but that there was another life. He was perfectly willing to sacri fice some of the finely decorated and well-fash ioned utensils that had taken a good deal of time in the making, in order that his dead ones might have near them in the other world their favorite implements of this. In a word archae
ology has shown us the first man of whom we know anything definitely, as a reasoning being with a highly developed sense of beauty, with a belief in immortality, with feeling for others, with a compelling tendency to surround himself with beautiful things as far as he could and not with that supposed tendency to occupy him self exclusively with utilities which instead of representing development always indicates a tendency at least to degeneration.
The one question that remains then is whether there is room in Biblical chronology for the record of man as worked out by sci ence. Here once more the conservative views of the early Fathers of the Church are extremely important in enabling us to understand what should be looked upon as the prevailing belief in these matters. The supposed incompatibility of science and faith in the matter is entirely due to a comparatively recent misunderstanding of the Scriptures. Some of the early Fathers of the Church took the days of creation liter ally, but the Alexandrian Fathers who faced these problems in true philosophic temper inter preted the days of creation ideally, taking the words of Genesis as a human mode of speech so that men might understand what was expressed in terms of their previous knowledge. Such distinguished Christian philosophers as Clement, Athanasius, Cyril and Origen, as well as Saint Augustine, taught that creation was a single act. Augustine as we have seen declared that °the seeds of things" were first created and then went on' developing because of the living power put into them.
The Fathers manifestly did not feel that a definite date for the creation of man was set by the account in Genesis. It was Archbishop Usher under post-Reformation influences who first calculated that the creation of Adam was 4004 B.C. Indeed the literal interpretation of the rather vague wording of Scripture with re gard to many things is quite modern as a rule. As in the question of a universal deluge, which is not Biblical, more careful study of the scrip tural text shows that there is no good reason for any such limitation of time as Usher sug gested. There is absolute freedom to discuss the age of man on earth as far older than any such date. Rev. Father Obermaier and Abbe Breuil, to whom we owe more of our exact knowledge as to the cave man and our earliest ancestors than any. others, have discussed the probable date of this dwelling in caves very fully. Obermaier thinks that 50,000 years might be necessary to include all phases of develop ment that have thus far been unearthed. Abbe Breuil is of the opinion that 20,000 years would be quite sufficient for all that recently discov ered facts as to man's development would de mand. Their opinions deserve the highest con sideration from students of science. The lower figure is confirmed by the conclusions of Prest wich, a well-known authority on geology, who limits the time since the.Glacial period to 25,000 years and man is surely post-glacial.