During its habitation by man the climate appears to have been cold and damp, and among the contemporary fauna were the mammoth, woolly-haired rhinoceros, cave-bear, and musk-ox. The two earlier elephants and the Rhinoceros merckii were not represented.
The special features of its industrial remains were the scarcity of the coup-de-poing, and the splitting up of flints into smaller implements, such as scrapers and large flakes, mostly trimmed on one side as already described. This multiplication of small implements was due to the fact that man, owing to the coldness of the climate, was obliged to seek shelter in caves, or improvised huts, and to clothe himself with skins, the preparation of which, especially in the later epochs, entailed the use of special tools and instruments. On the whole, the remains of man's handicraft works disclose an advance on those of the "drift-men"; but there was a sufficient sprinkling of the latter to show that both people were of the same race.
Aurignacien.
Prior to 1852 the small grotto of Aurignac (Haute-Garonne) was concealed by a talus, and only then incidentally discovered by a workman in pursuit of a rabbit. The entrance was closed by a stone slab, and inside were the remains of seventeen human skeletons, which, on the discovery becoming known, were, by order of the mayor of the town, removed, and reburied in the parish cemetery. Outside the flagstone which closed the entrance to the cave were found, along with ashes and a hearth made of flat stones, a finger-marked circular hammerstone used for chipping flints, and "a great variety of bones and implements; amongst the latter not fewer than 100 flint articles—knives, projectiles, sling-stones, and chips, and among them one of these siliceous cores or nuclei with numerous facets, from which flakes or knives had been struck off… Among the bone instruments were arrows without barbs and other tools made of reindeer horn, and a bodkin formed out of the more compact horn of the roe-deer" Antiquity of Man, p. 184). One of the bone objects, pointed at one end and y having a broad split base (Pl. V., No. 1), is regarded as giving the station its special character. Scattered through the earth
