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.