Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/190

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182
PREHISTORIC BRITAIN

conclusion that the individual to whom they belonged had been ceremonially buried.

Several interments dating from the Magdalénien and Transition periods have come to light, which had the peculiarity of having the skeletons sprinkled over with a layer of ochre. This was the case with almost all the skeletons found in the caves of Grimaldi, and in the stations of Chancelade, Mas-d'Azil, Bünn (Moravia), and Paviland (Gower Peninsula). That this formed part of some ritual ceremony is now generally admitted by archaeologists. The inference from these, and other data now at our disposal, is that some of the earlier Palæolithic races had been in the habit of burying their dead with ceremonious rites, so circumstantially carried out as to suggest that they were the outcome of an already established cult of the dead.

Some writers maintain that the Palæolithic figure paintings on the walls of caves were inspired by religious motives. Notably is this the case in respect of the remarkable fresco discovered on the rock of Cogul, in the valley of the Ebro, in Spain, which shows a group of nine women dancing round a nude man. Their garments disclose a striking likeness to those of the Minoan women, as figured on the fresco paintings on the walls of Knossos. Breuil regards the Cogul scene, as well as some other rock-illustrations found on the south of the Cantabric Cordilleras and the Pyrenees, as a continuation of the cave paintings of France and Spain to the north