High blood pressure and longevity : and other essays / selected from the published writings of David Riesman.

  • David Riesman
Date:
[1937], ©1937
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: High blood pressure and longevity : and other essays / selected from the published writings of David Riesman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    696/750 (page 678)
    grace—every additional mouth to feed was an unwelcome burden. The few human figures that have been found are chiefly those of the female, and are far less artistic than the animal pictures. They have small heads, large, pendulous breasts and huge buttocks, like the Hottentots. Is this figure a mythical or symbolic expression of fecundity or is it a realistic representation of the Aurignacian Venus? As an amateur I ought perhaps not to express an opinion, but I could not escape the feeling that the cave art as well as the engraved bone and stone implements and ornaments represent a real urge for artistic expression, an hypothesis that does not contra¬ vene or exclude other motives. Primitive man made use also of another kind of protected home, the so-called rock shelters, deep natural excavations in the sides of cliffs. A typical rock shelter is that of Laugerie-Basse, which is quite extraordinary in that it is possible to identify in its super¬ imposed layers nearly all the old stone epochs. The thin com¬ pressed strata remind one of a layer cake, with layers rich in relics separated by sterile ones. In Laugerie-Basse, as almost nowhere else, one can trace without interruption all the ages of man in France—the Paleolithic, the Neolithic, the Gallo-Roman, the Middle Ages, and the present. Few places in the world have been inhabited by man for so many thousands of years without interruption. Before leaving the Les Eyzies region we paid a brief visit to the village of Cromagnon, one of the holy places of anthropology, for it was here the famous Cromagnon man was discovered in 1868, during the construction of a railroad. There is, however, little of interest left in the sparsely settled village. Recently a statue has been erected at Les Eyzies to represent the Old Man of Cromag¬ non. It does not picture him as an Adonis; the long-armed slouch¬ ing gorilla-like figure hardly suggests the talented painter of Font de Gaume or Combarelles. But after all the artist’s fancy has nothing to do with unrecoverable reality. Buried skeletons of a race similar to the men of Cromagnon but shorter in stature have been found in considerable number at Grimaldi near Mentone. The physical characters of the Grimaldi race are suggestive of a negroid admixture—this is also true of the taller race—which is not surprising in view of the probability of the existence of a land bridge to Africa in prehistoric times. Sir Arthur Keith, I may add, does not believe that Cromagnons had negroid characters because they were hybrids. As a “Unitarian” he would explain the evolution of the human race on the basis of a common ancestor, and that it was only after dispersion that the differentia¬ tion occurred into the black, yellow and white races of mankind.