Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo12amer (find matches)
Year: 1900 (1900s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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AHer Cartailhac and Breuil Outlines of a painting from the cavern at Cogul, Spain. We have here the unmistakable characteristics of domestic cattle with a hunting scene in the background. Tliis cavern furnishes about the only known attempt to portray human beings. Probably Aurignacian stage rhinoceros. Their rela- tive frequency of occur- rence is almost in the order just stated. Occa- sionally we find deer, ibex (?) and rarely birds. Of carnivorous animals there are a few examples, sur- prisingly few. What we should most like to see would be a portrait of Aurignacian man him- self, but this seems to have been a subject re- ligiously avoided, per- haps tabooed for some reason. This is quite in contrast to our own art where the human form is usually present and often the main feature in the composition. Yet^in the Spanish cavern of Cogul there are a few crude sketches of women in costume and one or two nude men. Perhaps stranger still, two women are drawn as if herding oxen not unlike the domestic cattle of to-day. While the cattle are shown with all the precision and fidelity of Aurignacian art, the human figure- are very crude and indefinite: thus even in the exception we prove the rule. We may now give a passing thought as to what became of this art. Did it \anish or iV 1 it survive in a li\'ing sense with varying fortunes down to the days of Greece and Rome? Following the Aurignacian culture is another called the Magdalenian, but the change seems to have been far from abrupt. Even the experts have some difficulty in agreeing as to what is Aurignacian and what is )\Iagdalenian, and there is great probability that some of the cave paint- ings are truly Magdalenian. Yet what we have here is after all but a marginal distribution, for polychrome art is certainly not a characteristic of )\Iagdalenian culture, the presumption being that it exists in Magdalenian time only as a fringe of Aurignacian cul- ture. Magdalenian man on the other hand developed work in bone and deco- rated many of his implements with engravings equal if not superior in technique to his Aurignacian predeces- sor. As noted in the table, a culture called Solutrean falls between Aurigna- cian and Magdalenian, a stage during
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Unfinished sketch of Font-dc-G aume Hon (?), 293

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