¹ I am using here the Spanish league (legua) which is 6 kilometres or 3¾ miles, because it represents one hour’s journey on foot at normal gait.

² On the ground Altamira is rather further from Font de Gaume than from Niaux. A traveller from Altamira to Font de Gaume has to skirt the wide re-entrant made by the Bay of Biscay which adds nearly an extra day to his journey.

³ For a further discussion of this point I must refer readers to my Altanara (Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1938).

⁴ It is impossible to overestimate the importance of fat among these ancient hunting tribes. The climate was a cold one. Fat as a food was then as highly appreciated as blubber is by an Eskimo. In the form of grease, probably mixed with red ochre, it made an unguent to protect the hunters’ naked bodies from chill and damp, and it formed the only smokeless illuminant available for the cave-artist, who used it also as a medium with which to mix his pigments. It had, in fact, the same universal usefulness that olive oil had later in ancient Greece.

⁵ It is a Spanish mastiff. You can see its counterpart on any big Spanish farm today ; in Bewick’s Quadrupeds (1789) it figures as the ‘Ban Dog’—an admirable portrait.

⁶ This tribe probably never exceeded two or three hundred souls at any time in its existence. The distribution of the Australian hunter-aborigines when the English arrived was about 1 man to every 45,000 acres. Hunting tribes are never thick upon the ground.

⁷ This wolf’s head may perhaps represent the disguise of a wolf’s mask and skin successfully adopted by the bison’s hunter. Catlin in his American Indians depicts a couple of hunters thus disguised stalking a bison herd.

⁸ The Cave of Altamira, by H. Breuil and H. Obermaier. (Madrid 1936).

⁹ Both reproduced in Baldwin Brown’s Art of the Cave-Dweller, figs. 105, 41. A drawing beside the Pasiega signs has been interpreted as the sole of a human foot. It almost certainly represents the spoor of a cave-bear, all five toes being of equal size and length.

¹⁰ Capt. H. C. Brocklehurst, Game Animals of the Sudan, p. 170. (Gurney & Jack son, 1931).

¹¹ This is substantially the same view as that taken by Professor Marcellin Boule in his Fossil Men, see p. 257, note. (Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh 1923).

¹² This beast has already the marked embonpoint so common in later drawings in this cave. Professor H. F. Osborn considers it Early Magdalenian.

¹³ H. F. Osborn, Men of the Old Stone Age, p. 209.

¹⁴ See Brocklehurst’s Game Animals of the Sudan, illustrations facing pp. 107, 108, 110.

¹⁵ Reproduced on the cover of S. Reinach’s Repertoire de l’art quaternaire. (Paris, 1913).

¹⁶ This was the specimen found in 1907-8 on the Sangayurakh river, and later presented to Paris by the Count Stenbock-Fermor. See Bassett Digby, The Mammoth, pp. 211-12. (Witherby 1926).

¹⁷ See Limeuil; son gisement à gravures sur pierre de l’Age du Renne. (Capitan et Bouyssonie, Paris 1904). These Limeuil engravings, many of which look, as Professor Baldwin Brown has pointed out, like the practice-pieces of students, are almost certainly a local product.

¹⁸ Copies of these engravings by the Abbe Breuil are in the Compte Rendu of the 14th International Congress of Anthropology and Archaeology. (Geneva 1912).

¹⁹ Many cave-drawings that we now see as bare outline engravings may have been coloured once. If the colours used were pure, that is to say unmixed with melted fat or marrow as a medium, they would last a very short time. In southern Spain, where I live, I tried the experiment of making drawings on a cave wall with fragments of charcoal and red earth picked up off the cave floor. No vestige of these drawings remained after three years. Had I wished them to endure for ever (which heaven forfend) I must needs have taken with me lard and a stove.