A glance at these implements, for instance the small flint scraper with narrow high back and perpendicular chipping along the sides, is enough to show that the men who once warmed their fingers here were of the so-called Aurignacian type (Aurignac in the department of Haute Garonne, in southern France), that is to say, lived somewhere about the dawn of the third stage of the palaeolithic epoch.
Directly after their disappearance nature would seem to have sealed up the cave again until our time, so that we can study them here all by themselves.
Now let us take our lamps and explore the secrets of the interior.
The icy torrents that hollowed it in the limestone have eaten away rounded alcoves along the sides.

On the white surface of these, glazed over with a preserving film of stalactite, we at once notice the outlines of many hands.

Most of them left hands, showing that the Aurignacians tended to be right-handed, like ourselves, and dusted on the paint, black manganese or red ochre, between the outspread fingers in just way that we, too, would find convenient.

Curiously enough, this practice of stencilling hands upon the walls of caves is in vogue amongst the Australian natives; though unfortunately, they keep the reason, if there is any deeper one than mere amusement, strictly to themselves.

Like the Australians, again, and other rude peoples, these Aurignacians would appear to have been given to lopping off an occasional finger--from some religious motive, we may guess--to judge from the mutilated look of a good many of the handprints.
The use of paint is here limited to this class of wall-decoration.
But a sharp flint makes an excellent graving tool; and the Aurignacian hunter is bent on reproducing by this means the forms of those game-animals about which he doubtless dreams night and day.