Paleolithic man in Europe.  It was to the Paleolithic stage that the earliest men belonged whose relics are found in Europe.  They had learned to knock off two-edged flakes from flint pebbles, and to work them into simple weapons.  The great discovery had been made that fire could be kindled and made use of, as the charcoal and the stones discolored by heat of their ancient hearths attest.  Caves and shelters beneath overhanging cliffs were their homes or camping places.  Paleolithic man was a savage of the lowest type, who lived by hunting the wild beasts of the time.

Skeletons found in certain caves in Belgium and France represent perhaps the earliest race yet found in Europe.  These short, broad-shouldered men, muscular, with bent knees and stooping gait, low-browed and small of brain, were of little intelligence and yet truly human.

The remains of Pleistocene man are naturally found either in caverns, where they escaped destruction by the ice sheets, or in deposits outside the glaciated area.  In both cases it is extremely difficult, or quite impossible, to assign the remains to definite glacial or interglacial times.  Their relative age is best told by the fauna with which they are associated.  Thus the oldest relics of man are found with the animals of the late Tertiary or early Quaternary, such as a species of hippopotamus and an elephant more ancient than the mammoth.  Later in age are the remains found along with the mammoth, cave bear and cave hyena, and other animals of glacial time which are now extinct; while more recent still are those associated with the reindeer, which in the last ice invasion roamed widely with the mammoth over central Europe.

The caves of southern France.  These contain the fullest records of the race, much like the Eskimos in bodily frame, which lived in western Europe at the time of the mammoth and the reindeer.  The floors of these caves are covered with a layer of bone fragments, the remains of many meals, and here are found also various articles of handicraft.  In this way we know that the savages who made these caves their homes fished with harpoons of bone, and hunted with spears and darts tipped with flint and horn.  The larger bones are split for the extraction of the marrow.  Among such fragments no split human bones are found; this people, therefore, were not cannibals.  Bone needles imply the art of sewing, and therefore the use of clothing, made no doubt of skins; while various ornaments, such as necklaces of shells, show how ancient is the love of personal adornment.  Pottery was not yet invented.  There is no sign of agriculture.  No animals had yet been domesticated; not even man’s earliest friend, the dog.  Certain implements, perhaps used as the insignia of office, suggest a rude tribal organization and the beginnings of the state.  The remains of funeral feasts in front of caverns used as tombs point to a religion and the belief in a life beyond the grave.  In the caverns of southern France are found also the beginnings of the arts of painting and of sculpture.  With surprising skill these Paleolithic men sketched on bits of ivory the mammoth with his long hair and huge curved tusks, frescoed their cavern walls with pictures of the bison and other animals, and carved reindeer on their dagger heads.