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Abstract: Beyond the 75 animal and human pictures, the 491 Magdalenian engraved plaquettes bear 410 abstract signs, in 14 different types, among which eight were unknown up to now in South-Western France, (more than 130 cases). Some examples of all those signs are shown. Besides there are 213 groups of parallel lines. At “Les Beaux-Sarts”, less than 2m from the hut described in 2003, another human excavation (maybe a tomb?) delivered a schist plaquette with 94 parallel lines carved on its surface, the lines appear as three groups of 14, 7 (or 8?) and 24 (or 28?) lines and one group of 17 (or 18?) oblique lines, with various secondary lines. Five thousand years before the cerebral center of precise calculation was at the beginning of its formation, this piece, out of the bases of which calculation might be subdivided, cannot be considered as the evidence that they were able to count. The author analyses the affective mental possibilities proved by those elements and puts them apart from the rational progress in the abstraction possibilities of the human brain, which occurred later all through ten thousand years. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

After the strong climatic shocks which happened over and over again, which made the hands free and which started the biological and cultural development of Hominoids, everything depended on the brains of the species concerned and their ability to correlate and invent, because of the constant pressure of their natural and social environment. We are less interested in describing 15 steps here, than in specifying, for each reference mark in a non-stop process, the level reached by mental ability as much cognizantly as affectingly and the neurological bases, which allowed them to occur. This progression was based on the complexification (through epigenesis) of intracerebral connections at different levels allowing us to have large conscience and language, which are the bases of our freedom (via feelings, re-entries and mental pictures). Consequently, men could progressively have control of natural powers, inert ones first (tools), then moving ones (fire), living (hunting) and social ones (slavery); at last, men could free himself from them and perceive them objectively, dominate them, and conceive them in time and abstraction. Writing, then philosophy, then counting and logic have only recently crowned the progress towards the conquest of abstract and humanism through reversive action. The whole show phyletical gradualism, which is still progressing. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]