To bolster up the hypothesis, that some of the scraps of bones belonged to ape-men; who lived about 50,000 years ago, we are told that, in many caverns there are paintings of animals, some of which are extinct, proving that the artists were ape-men of advancing intellect, living in that day. These drawings are rude, and inexact, and the resemblance to extinct animals rather fanciful. If the writer were to try to draw a picture of a horse on the stone walls of a dark cavern, with no light, it would be just as likely to resemble an extinct animal, or possibly an animal that never did live and never will. Many of the paintings are found in the depths of unlit caverns, often difficult of access. How could they paint any picture in the dark, when even fire was unknown, and the torch and lamp-wick had not yet been invented? And how could they make a ladder, or erect scaffolding of any sort in that rude age, before there were inventions of any kind? Yet they tell us that the frescoes on the ceiling of the dark cavern of Altamira, Spain, were made 25,000 to 50,000 years ago, when fire was unknown, and they ask us to believe that several colors are used, brown, red, black, yellow, and white; and that these drawings and colors have remained undisturbed and unchanged through these long ages. Is it easier to believe this, than to believe that these drawings were made by modern man, using modern inventions? A theory left to such support, must be poverty-stricken in argument indeed.
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