Word: caving
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Mind evolves. Date of these cave paintings is about 30,000 B.C.-the Paleolithic or Early Stone Age. It was a glacial epoch: the last continental ice sheet, retreating from northern Germany and Britain, still covered Scandinavia. The Alpine and Pyrenean glaciers shouldered far out into the adjoining plains; all Europe was cold, ranged over by reindeer, mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses (see cut, p. 50). Here, arriving probably by migration from North Africa, homo sapiens first appeared in Europe. The Cro-Magnon race inherited or seized the valleys of the small-brained, beetle-browed, long-armed, chinless and nigh speechless homo...
...Neanderthalers had no art. The first artists were the Cro-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...
...pictured animals are always game, supremely important to a folk in a cold climate, ignorant of agriculture, crudely weaponed and without means of storing food. Commonest beast in cave murals is the horse, and bones in prehistoric garbage dumps show the horse was the chief game animal. In all cave art, male figures are far outnumbered by female figures, which were introduced only as symbols of fecundity to insure increase among the deer, bison and mammoths as well as women...
...shoulders like goal posts and an appetite for hard work, long hours and a pipe that smells like an unfrequented sulphur sink in Yellowstone Park. Son of a Hannibal, Mo. locomotive engineer (as a boy he saw Hannibal's first citizen, Mark Twain, explored Tom Sawyer's cave), Nelson worked his way through the University of Missouri waiting on tables, where he studied human nature by observing the reactions of students on whom he spilled hot gravy...
Carmen Amaya is about 19: her family cannot quite remember, and their notes on the subject differ. She began dancing for tourists when she was four, in the family cave in the gypsy quarter of Granada. The footloose Amayas took her to dance at the Barcelona exhibition when she was about seven, let her appear in Singer Raquel Meller's show in Paris a year later...