MADELENIAN  , a

term derived from La Madeleine, a cave in the Vezere, about midway between Moustier and Les Eyzies, France, and given by the French anthropologist Gabriel de Mortillet to the third stage of his system of cave-chronology, synchronous with the fourth or most recent division of the Quaternary Age . The Madelenian epoch was a long one, represented by numerous stations, whose contents show progress in the arts and general culture . It was characterized by a cold and dry climate, the existence of man in association with the reindeer, and the extinction of the mammoth . The use of bone and ivory for various implements, already begun in the preceding Solutrian epoch, was much increased, and the period is essentially a Bone age . The bone instruments are very varied: spear-points; harpoon-heads, borers, hooks and needles . Most remarkable is the evidence La Madeleine affords of prehistoric art . Numbers of bones, reindeer antlers and animals' teeth were found, with rude pictures, carved or etched on them, of seals, fishes, reindeer, mammoths and other creatures . The best of these are a mammoth engraved on a fragment of its own ivory; a dagger of reindeer antler, with handle in form of a reindeer; a cave-bear cut on a flat piece of schist; a seal on a bear's tooth; a fish well drawn on a reindeer antler; and a complete picture, also on reindeer antler, showing horses, an aurochs, trees, and a snake biting a man's leg . The man is naked, and this and the snake suggest a warm climate, in spite of the presence of the reindeer . The fauna of the Madelenian epoch seems, indeed, to have included tigers and other tropical species side by side with reindeer, blue foxes, Arctic hares and other polar creatures . Madelenian man appears to have been of low stature, dolichocephalic, with low retreating forehead and prominent brow ridges . Besides La Madeleine the chief stations of the epoch are Les Eyzies, Laugerie Basse, and Gorge d'Enfer in Dordogne; Grotte du Placard in Charente and others in south-west France .

See G. de Mortillet, Le Prehistorique (1900); Edouard Lartet and

Henry Christy, Religuiae A quitanicae (1865–1875); Edouard Dupont, Le Temps prehistorique en Belgique (1872) ; Lord Avebury, Prehistoric Times (1900) .