Word: breuil
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Visiting Lady. Dear to South African diggers are colored cave drawings, some made by modern Bushmen, some (perhaps) very old. French Digger Abbé Henri Breuil favors the "very old" theory. In the Drakensberg mountains he found drawings of men who were certainly not Bushmen. They wore long cloaks with triangular markings and serrated bottom edges. On their shoulders they carried quivers. After studying them for a while, the romantic abbé decided that they might be ancient Sumerians who wandered down to South Africa thousands of years ago and posed for indigenous portrait painters...
...France's foremost prehistorian, the Abbé Henri Breuil, soon inspected the pictures, pronounced them genuine and highly important. Early this year he managed to relay news of the discovery to the learned British journal, Nature. Archeologists and anthropologists world-over opened their eyes in amazement, then frowned wearily at the difficulty of getting adequate photographs through the confusion and censorship of Vichy. Last week TIME succeeded in bringing them out. The most interesting of them appear herewith...
...Magnon men, whose earliest culture-period is called the Aurignacian. The newfound cave at Montignac represents this glimmering dawn-culture on the vastest scale yet found. Its significance, says U.S. Prehistorian George Grant MacCurdy, is that the appearance of art "marks a distinct epoch in mental evolution." The Abbe Breuil calls the Montignac cave "the Sistine Chapel of Aurignacian...
...Montignac cave, many tortured galleries still remain unexplored, many scratched figures still undeciphered. "There may yet be many surprises in store," observes Breuil, who knows that cave paintings are sometimes hidden a half-mile from the entrances. There may also be many undiscovered Paleolithic caves on both slopes of the Pyrenees. Today archeologists are more eager than ever to continue their explorations, but they fear that for years to come the prizes will fall only to French schoolboys...