Solutrean The Aurignacian stage was succeeded by the Solutrean. This horizon is distinguished by the presence in its remains of the most delicately and perfectly worked leaf-shaped flints for knives, heads of spears, javelins and arrows, and in general by a sud den great improvement in the manufacture and design of all objects made of flint or quartz. This skilful culture, evidences of which are spread from the lower Danube Valley to the Bay of Biscay, is believed to be the product of fresh immigration of people from the teeming East, who moved westward along the northern border of the Black Sea and advanced up the Danube Valley and finally became predominant in southern Europe; yet it seems plain that the Cro-Magnons were not utterly destroyed even there, and that both in northern Europe and south of the Pyrenees they persisted in force. These invading Solutrean folks, who take their name from a vast camp, ringed with the turf-covered bones of tens of thousands of horses, slaughtered for food, near Solutre in southern France, were a practical people, ruder than those they had overcome, and during their time art declined.
Magdalenian Comparative re finement revived, however, during the succeed ing stage, the Magdalenian, when art was de veloped to its highest perfection in prehistory. Whatever may have been the racial character of the Solutrean people, the Magdalenean folk were unquestionably of Cro-Magnon stock. What was the occasion of the change that ar chwologists note at this point can only be con jectured, but the fact is plain. These Magda lenian Cro-Magnons attained in this period their highest culture and widest dispersion of the race. They have been traced northward to England and central Belgium, and eastward throughout central Germany, but never, ap parently, colonized Italy or southern Spain. They were, as before, a nomadic and hunter people; hut by this time the cold, wet climate had gradually softened into a warmer and dry ing one, and the growth of dense forests every where made the chase more and more difficult and arduous. Moreover the animals going in herds, such as the reindeer, wild cattle and horses, that needed large open grazing areas, had departed. In conformity with this the Magdalenians gradually became less nomadic, and depended more on fishing than on hunting for subsistence. Under these sedentary and softening influences the craft of the flintworker declined, for only poor and simple kinds of stone implements are recovered from village sites of this time of decay; but the village-sites yield great numbers of skilfully contrived hooks, harpoon-heads, and other fishing-tools, chiefly made of bone. The style is quite new, and now are first seen round and barbed bone spearheads, the earliest with only an experi mental barb, but later always furnished with rows of recurved barbs along their sides.
In this quieter life, where in the long-settled, favorable and populous districts of southern France and the neighboring border of Spain the people must have obtained a firm tribal organi zation, the Magdalenians acquired that power of draftsmanship, sculpture and painting that has astonished the critical world, and has been il lustrated so thoroughly in several recent books, as those of Sollas, Elliot and Osborn, and in the Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution, not to mention the many learned writings in French, Spanish and German. Nearly all the
finest painting of this period as well as that of the Aurignacian artists is on the walls and ceilings of deep and totally dark caverns — a fact that has caused much speculation as to the motive that carried such art into places where the work could be made or observed only by lamplight. aft would appear,'" remarks Osborn, that the love of art for art's sake . . . together with the fine spaces which these cav erns alone afforded for large representations, may be an alternative explanation" de cline of the Cro-Magnons may have been owing largely to environmental causes; but it may have been accelerated by the arrival, probably occasioning long battling, of two streams of newcomers, one of which, known as the Azili ans, spread all over France and Belgium, and the other, the Tardenois, occupied Spain at first, but gradually coalesced with the other. Their flints are small and peculiar, totally unlike any thing used by the Cro-Magnons. This may have been the result of a necessary change in the character of hunting weapons, for now southern Europe was covered with heavy for ests, the reindeer had retreated to the North and the stag was the principal game-animal; in fact the people seem to have depended mainly on fishing for subsistence. The climate was still cool and moist, and therefore the use of caves and rock-shelters continued, but otherwise the habits and culture of these final races of Paleolithic man in southern Europe were to tally different from, without being much in ad vance of those of the Magdalenians. Who were these final Paleoliths? The Azilians were a brachycephalic people, the first of that type to appear in the West; and it is believed that they may represent the first-comers of the Alpine, or Celtic, race of modern ethnology. They are often designated as the Furfooz stocrc. The other was- a long-and-narrow-headed race that came in from northern Africa via Spain, and are thought to represent the earliest indication of what Sergi calls the Mediterranean race. It is evident that both were mentally superior to, and more broadly cultivated than, the Cro. Magnons, except in artistic matters, and sub dued the latter completely; yet there is evidence that in southern France, at least, large commu nities of Cro-Magnons continued to live and develop, and have persisted there to the present day. After a few centuries, however, these Azilian-Tardenois men, the last of the purely hunting-races, themselves suffered displacement by the incoming of a more advanced people moving westward along the great Mediterranean highway of migration, and with their disappear ance the Old Stone Age comes to an end.