ABSTRACT
Museum displays and books present a rather stereotyped picture of human life during the Old Stone Age. They commonly show small bands of half-naked, muscular, and hairy people either hunting in a savanna kind of country or butchering game animals near the entrance to a cave. The atmosphere of primitive human life can be recaptured with particular intensity in the valleys of the Vézère and the Dordogne rivers in France, which contain hundreds of sites once occupied by Homo sapiens neanderthalis and Homo sapiens sapiens. Although primitive people first utilized such natural shelters as caves, overhanging rocks, or even hollow trees, they soon began to build artificial shelters. As far back as 30,000 years ago some of these were of impressive complexity and workmanship. Practically all human groups have thus learned to utilize local resources and to develop architectural designs for building shelters suited to climatic conditions.
