Quotes About Palaeolithic

My father, Professor Beddingfeld, was one of England's greatest living authorities on Primitive Man. He really was a genius—everyone admits that. His mind dwelt in Palaeolithic times, and the inconvenience of life for him was that his body inhabited the modern world. Papa did not care for modern man—even Neolithic Man he despised as a mere herder of cattle, and he did not rise to enthusiasm until he reached the Mousterian period.

Some Palaeolithic heroes survived in later mythical literature. The Greek hero Herakles, for example, is almost certainly a relic of the hunting period.

Now that modern Western culture is itself starting to abandon rigid gender divisions and polarities, to challenge its customary sharp distinction between animal and human, and to admit to fluidity in the making and remaking of individual identity, it is beginning to perceive the same patterns in the creations of the Palaeolithic.

The so-called 'Sleeping Lady' statues found in the Hypogeum and numerous 'Venus' figurines found throughout Malta's megalithic temples leave little doubt that a form of Mother Goddess was the supreme deity worshipped in these mysterious places. But these artifacts 'have all been attributed arbitrarily to the Neolithic', even though they are distinctly characteristic of European Palaeolithic art forms, dating as far back at 30,000 BP.