Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/117

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NEOLITHIC CIVILIZATION
109

for the first time been recognized, although a few specimens had already been found in other stations. Since attention has been directed to them they have been discovered in considerable numbers in various and widely separated localities, and are regarded as typical relics of the transition period.

Among other cave-dwellings which have yielded flat harpoons made of red-deer horn one of the most interesting is the Grotte de Reilhac (Lot), described by MM. Cartailhac and Boule in 1889. On Fig. 20 are shown four worked objects from this station, viz. portion of a harpoon typical of the Magdalénien epoch (4), two harpoons of the Azilian type (5, 6), and a deer-horn holder for a stone axe so commonly met with among lake-dwelling relics (7). The presence of these relics, so characteristic of the successive cultural stages, conclusively proves that the Grotte de Reilhac was inhabited from the Reindeer period down to Neolithic times.

In face of these and other rapidly accumulating facts, proving the existence of deposits of human débris containing relics stratigraphically proved to be later than those of the Reindeer period, but older than those of the polished stone age, Mortillet abandoned the Hiatus theory and filled up the gap by adding a new epoch to his previous classification, which he called Tourassien, after the Grotte de la Tourasse (Haute-Garonne). This station yielded, along with a few other bone relics of intermediary forms, no less