There are, however, some drawings--cut on bone or horn
or stone with a flint implement--which evince great skill in
line-drawing and, in a few cases, in composition. Some of the
caves also are more or less frescoed; the outlines of animals,
sometimes of life-size and in great numbers, are cut in the wall,
and often filled in with pigment. This skill does not imply any
greater general intelligence than the rest of the culture
exhibits. It implies persistent and traditional concentration
upon the new artistic life. The men who drew the "reindeer of
Thayngen" and carved the remarkable statuettes of women in ivory
or stone, were ignorant of the simplest rudiments of pottery or
agriculture, which many savage tribes possess.
Some writers compare them with the Eskimo of to-day, and even
suggest that the Eskimo are the survivors of the race, retreating
northward with the last ice-sheet, and possibly egged onward by a
superior race from the south. It is, perhaps, not a very
extravagant claim that some hundreds of thousands of years of
development--we are now only a few tens of thousands of years
from the dawn of civilisation--had lifted man to the level of the
Eskimo, yet one must hesitate to admit the comparison.
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