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A Cro-Magnon male skull

The term falls outside the usual naming conventions for early humans and is used in a general sense to describe the oldest modern people in Europe, though also a specific (but very frequent) subtype among their fossil remains.

Excavations

The Cro-Magnon Skull

The condition and placement of the remains along with pieces of shell and animal tooth in what appears to have been pendants or necklaces raises the question whether or not they were buried intentionally. If Cro-Magnons buried their dead intentionally it suggests they had a knowledge of ritual, by burying their dead with necklaces and tools, or an idea of disease and that the bodies needed to be contained.^[2]

Analysis of the pathology of the skeletons shows that the humans of this time period led a physically difficult life. In addition to infection, several of the individuals found at the shelter had fused vertebrae in their necks indicating traumatic injury, and the adult female found at the shelter had survived for some time with a skull fracture. As these injuries would be life threatening even today, this may show that Cro-Magnons believed in community support and took care of each others' injuries.^[2]

Cro-Magnon life

Cro-Magnons lived from about 45,000 to 10,000 years ago in the Upper Paleolithic period of the Pleistocene epoch. Cro-Magnon were anatomically modern, only differing from their modern day descendants in Europe by their more robust physiology and slightly larger cranial capacity.^[3] Of modern nationalities, Finns are closest to Cro-Magnons in terms of anthropological measurements.^[4]

They had a balanced diet of meat, grain, wild carrot, beetroot, onion, turnip and other foods.

Surviving Cro-Magnon artifacts include huts, cave paintings, carvings and antler-tipped spears. The remains of tools suggest that they knew how to make woven clothing. They had huts, constructed of rocks, clay, bones, branches, and animal hide/fur. These early humans used manganese and iron oxides to paint pictures and may have created the first calendar around 15,000 years ago^[5].

The flint tools found in association with the remains at Crô-Magnon have associations with the Aurignacian culture that Lartet had identified a few years before he found the skeletons.

The Cro-Magnons must have come into contact with the Neanderthals, and are often credited with causing the latter's extinction, although morphologically modern humans seem to have coexisted with Neanderthals for up to 60,000 years in the Levant^[6] and for more than 15,000 years in France^[7].

Etymology

The "Cro-Magnon" rock shelter, located at Les Eyzies in the Dordogne in France, probably owes its name to a compound of two elements:

• Cro is presumably a dialectal form of creux, meaning "cavity" or "hollow"; such forms as crau, cro, crouè are found in French dialects, and all probably derive, through Vulgar Latin *crosus (not attested), from a Celtic root. http://suter.home.cern.ch/suter/topoC4.html#Cr1
• Magnon is almost certainly the augmentative form of the Old French adjective magne, from Latin magnus, meaning "large" or "great" and ultimately deriving from the Proto-Indo-European root * (related to English much).

Thus, the probable original meaning is "great cavity".^[8]

According to information on display in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, however, Magnon was simply the name of the proprietor who owned the land on which the cave is located when Lartet made his discovery in 1868.

Genetics

A 2003 study on Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA, published by an Italo-Spanish research team led by David Caramelli, concluded that Neanderthals were far outside the modern human range, while Cro-Magnons were well in the average of modern Europeans. mtDNA retrieved from two Cro-Magnon specimens was identified as Haplogroup N. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/100/11/6593 Haplogroup N is found among modern populations of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, and its descendant haplogroups is found among modern Eurasian and Native American populations. https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/atlas.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_N_(mtDNA)

See also

• List of fossil sites (with link directory)
• List of primate and hominin fossils (with images)
• Neanderthal interaction with Cro-Magnons
• Earth's Children, a series of historical fiction novels written by Jean M. Auel, taking place in ancient Europe

References

ca:Home de Cromanyó de:Cro-Magnon-Mensch es:Hombre de Cro-Magnon eu:Cro-Magnon fr:Homme de Cro-Magnon fy:Kro-Magnonminsk it:Uomo di Cromagnon nl:Cro-Magnonmens ja:??????? oc:Òme de Cròsmanhon pl:Homo sapiens fossilis pt:Cro-Magnon ru:??????????? sk:Kroma?onec fi:Cro-Magnonin ihminen sv:Cromagnonmänniskan uk:???????????? zh:?????