ART OF CENTURIES AGO

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 126, 24 November 1923, Page 16

ART OF CENTURIES AGO

WHAT.'. HAS HAPPENED Ef

25,000 YEARS.

A wonderful find of prehistoric.: clay models of animals has been made in a cave near Toulouse, which had never previously been explored. The models probably date back to a period 25,000 years ago. They show animals extinct in Europe for centuries, but which are known to have existed there in prehistoric .ages. Frescoes and carvings-in bone and ivory have in recent years been found m French and Spanish caves which show animals now extinct, but very few clay models of early man's making have yet been discovered. In this case, says the "Daily Mail," there are two tigers or lions, creatures no prehistoric representation of which has yet been found in France. It is impossible to give their exact age, but they are supposed to be the work of the cavedwellers of that period which is known in Southern France as the Magdalenian epoch, betweetf 50,000 and 20,000 years ago M. Norbet Carteret, a student of Toulouse University, was exploring the underground source of a small tributary of tne Garonne when he discovered a gallery which led to a series of caves. In the central cave he found a number of rough mural paintings of animals, but more valuable still a large number of clay models of different animals. In the middle was the model of a bear cub without a head, and lying next to it was the skull of a real. bear, left just as if-the prehistoric sculptor had been disturbed in the middle of his taslc by some tribal raid and. had never returned. Against the wall of the caves were the m?^ ,of two-animals of the cat tribe, either lions or tigers. These were about sft long and, like a number of th& other animals were covered with stalactites, lfie models were more varied and larg°r but not so well executed as those found in the Anege.