hey had large skulls, high
foreheads, well-marked chins, and other features such as modern man
possesses. They were true men at last--that is to say, like ourselves!
The spirited pictures they made on the walls of caves in France and
Spain show artistic sense and skill. Well-finished statuettes
representing nude female figures are also known. The elaborate burial
customs point to a belief in life after death. They made stone
implements--knives, scrapers, gravers, and the like, of the type known
as Palaeolithic, and these show interesting gradations of skill and
peculiarities of style. The "Cave-men" lived between the third and
fourth Ice Ages, along with cave-bear, cave-lion, cave-hyaena, mammoth,
woolly rhinoceros, Irish elk, and other mammals now extinct--taking us
back to 30,000-50,000 years ago, and many would say much more. Some of
the big-brained skulls of these Palaeolithic cave-men show not a single
feature that could be called primitive. They show teeth which in size
and form are exactly the same as those of a thousand generations
afterwards--and suffering from gumboil too! There seems little doubt
that these vigorous Palaeolithic Cave-men of Europe were living for a
while contemporaneously with the men of Neanderthal, and it is possible
that they directly or indirectly hastened the disappearance of their
more primitive collaterals. Curiously enough, however, they had not
themselves adequate lasting power in Europe, for they seem for the most
part to have dwindled away, leaving perhaps stray present-day survivors
in isolated districts. The probability is that after their decline
Europe was repeopled by immigrants from Asia. It cannot be said that
there is any inherent biological necessity for the decline of a vigorous
race--many animal races go back for millions of years--but in mankind
the historical fact is that a period of great racial vigour and success
is often followed by a period of decline, sometimes leading to practical
disappearance as a definite race. The causes of this waning remain very
obscure--sometimes environmental, sometimes constitutional, sometimes
competitive. Sometimes the introduction of a new parasite, like the
malaria organism, may have been to blame.

After the Ice Ages had passed, perhaps 25,000 years ago, the Palaeolithic
culture gave place to the Neolithic. The men who made rudely dressed but
often beautiful stone implements were succeeded or replaced by men who
made polished stone