It is certain that groups of singularly alphabetiform figures appear at times associated with the handiwork of the ‘Reindeer Period’. A good example of such a group is seen on the flank of a bison, painted in red and black on a wall of the Marsoulas Cave[4] (Fig. 4). Another curious group shows examples of the constantly recurring pectiform or comb-shaped figure. Others have been taken to represent the roof of some kind of hut. The only human sign is an open hand, which may be regarded as identical with the prototype of the Phoenician ‘kaph’, the ‘palus’ sign—our k. In its pictographic form it is found among the Cretan hieroglyphs, and a linearized version identical with ‘kaph’ recurs among the Minoan linear characters.
In Fig. 5[5] are collected some specimens of signs or symbolic figures from the Cave of Castillo, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, showing amongst others the ‘hand’ and some figures which may represent hats. A remarkable group of three alphabetiform signs occurs on a fragment of reindeer-horn discovered by M. Piette in the Cave of Gourdan.[6] One of these shows a great resemblance to an A or Aleph. A harpoon of reindeer-horn, again, from La Madeleine,[7] shows a group of eight linear signs, among which we may detect, however, several repetitions.
In the face of these and similar examples, are we to conclude with the late M. Piette[8] that there was a regular alphabetic script during the Pleistocene period, which in turn had been preceded by a hieroglyphic system?
Fig. 4.
Fig. 5.
The artistic achievements of the men of the Reindeer Period attained such a high level that even such a conclusion could hardly excite surprise. In their portrayal of animal forms—in their power of seizing the characteristic attitude of the creature represented—they show themselves on a level with those later ‘Minoan’ artists of prehistoric Crete and Greece who produced such masterpieces as the wild goat and kids or the bull-hunt on the Vaphio Cups. We now know that the Minoan race had also a highly developed form of linear script. Might not their remote predecessors on European soil have evolved the same?
Fig. 6.
That they had sufficient intellectual capacity to evolve a system of writing, can hardly be doubted. There were, no doubt, some inferior elements among the population of the Reindeer Period. It is possible that certain low cranial types of the Neanderthal class may have survived till late Pleistocene times; and the stratified remains, for instance, of the Grotte des Enfants at Grimaldi, near Mentone, show that its occupation by scions of a fine proto-European race—akin to the ‘men of Cro-Magnon’—alternated during a certain time with occupation by a race of negroid intruders presenting characteristics as low as those of the Australian black men.[9] But the prevailing type of skull associated with the interments in the Mentone Caves—those of men with upright jaw and finely cut nose—struck no less competent an observer than Sir E. Ray Lankester as exhibiting a perfection of development and a cranial capacity worthy to be compared with those of civilized Europeans of the present day.
We must, however, still remember that, whatever the intellectual capacity of these archaic people, they did not possess that heirloom of the Ages, the accumulated experience of the later races of mankind. Art, indeed, seems to have come to them by nature, and they had other germs of civilization—an incipient cult of the dead, some taste for personal ornament. They were possessed of a variety of arms and implements of stone and bone and other materials. They could kindle fire and even mitigate the darkness of their subterranean vaults with primitive stone lamps. They seem to have been skilful trappers, and had even learned to bridle the horse. Yet many of the most simple acquirements of primitive culture were still unknown to them. They knew neither the potter’s nor the weaver’s, nor the husbandman’s craft. They went mother-naked, and their principal dwellings were the caves and dens of the earth.
This is emphatically not a people to be credited with an advanced form of script. It seems more probable that the groups of linear signs that occur should rather be regarded as mnemonic symbols, and the mere isolated characters perhaps as individual marks. Some, it may be, had acquired a magical value. A mnemonic series may be paralleled by the well-known example of a mnemonic song of an Ojibway medicine-man, in which every sign suggests a whole order of ideas.
It is noteworthy that among the more abbreviated representations from the hands of the men of the Reindeer Period the human figure is little brought into play, though the eye and hand do occur. In general, moreover, we see little of the reaction of gesture language on their pictorial records. In a scene from the walls of the Cave of Les Combarelles,[10] however, a male figure is depicted with a hand raised, and the other held straight out—evidently representing some expressive utterance of gesture language (Fig. 7).
Another good instance of a gesture occurs among the strange anthropoid figures with animal profiles, which, nevertheless, Messieurs Cartailhac and Breuil consider to represent human subjects masked or travestied.[11] On the roof of the hall of the Altamira Cave is one of these quasi-human subjects, with the arms raised, with open palms in front of its head, an attitude on which its discoverers justly remark: ‘It is impossible to overlook the analogy of this gesture with that which throughout all antiquity and amongst nearly all peoples indicates supplication or prayer.’[12] As a sign of adoration it has given rise to the Egyptian hieroglyphic Ka.
Fig. 7.
Had the men of the Reindeer Period a fully developed speech in addition to this gesture language? That they had the elements of such, of course, stands to reason. Mere animal cries and what may be called ‘voice signs’ might have carried them far, nor would it be possible to say at what point the transition from such primitive methods of oral communication to what might legitimately be called articulate speech was overpassed.
But there are at least some weighty reasons for doubting whether this higher stage was really attained by Palaeolithic man. In North America, which, like other parts of that continent, seems to have received its first human settlers at a comparatively late geological date, a considerable amount of physical conformity is perceptible among the Red Indian tribes. But we are confronted by the significant fact that this racial unity is nevertheless compatible with the existence of a multiplicity of native tongues. It has been observed that the number of known stocks or families of Indian languages in the United States amounts to over three score, differing among themselves ‘as radically as each differs from Hebrew, Chinese, or English’.[13] In each of these linguistic families, again, there are several—sometimes as many as twenty—separate languages, which differ again from each other as much as do the various divisions of the ‘Aryan’ group.
But if the original forefathers of these tribes had brought with them a fully developed articulate speech, is it conceivable that the languages of their descendants should be so radically different? This phenomenon, moreover, is thrown into further relief by the fact that when we turn to the signs and gestures current among the Red Indian tribes we find a large common element.
It may be that the very deficiencies in articulate speech which we may justly assume to have existed during the Reindeer Period gave a spur to other means of personal intercommunication. Not only would the infancy