There is
therefore no ground for resenting the description, "the primeval
savage," which has been applied to early man. The human race is
already old, yet, as we saw, it is hardly up to the level of the
Australian black. The skeleton found at Chapelle-aux-Saints is
regarded as the highest known type of the race, yet the greatest
authority on it, M. Boule, says emphatically: "In no actual race
do we find the characters of inferiority--that is to say, the
ape-like features--which we find in the Chapelle-aux-Saints
head." The largeness of the head is in proportion to the robust
frame, but in its specifically human part--the front--it is very
low and bestial; while the heavy ridges over the large eyes, the
large flat stumpy nose, the thick bulge of the lips and teeth,
and the almost chinless jaw, show that the traces of his ancestry
cling close to man after some hundreds of thousands of years of
development.
The cold increases as we pass to the last part of the Old Stone
Age, the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods; and nothing is
clearer than that the pace of development increases at the same
time. Short as the period is, in comparison with the preceding,
it witnesses a far greater advance than had been made in all the
rest of the Old Stone Age.
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