Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans

This review is based on an incomplete reading of the book, as I just could not finish it. If you feel this invalidates the review, then please disregard. If you'd like to learn why I could not finish this book, please read on.

CRO-MAGNON is a work about early humanoid species, and the first part is devoted to the Neanderthals. The author engages in fanciful text that contributes little to the reader's understanding other than to highlight that there is a lot of conjecture going on here. There are nuggets of scientific data scattered throughout, so I latched onto these in the forlorn hope that Fagan would lead his narration to new and intriguing areas, but sadly he does not. Instead, he repeats the same concepts over and over and over again, to the point that I actually became somewhat irritated.

For example, Fagan concludes Chapter 5 (pg 102) with the following sentence: "Within a remarkably short time, some of their descendants moved out of the Near East into Eurasia and Europe - to a completely different world." Then, just a mere 9 pages later (pg 111), he gives us a new chapter break that reads, "Within a few millenia, some of their descendants moved out of the Near East into Eurasia and Europe - to a completely different world."

Now I don't know about you, but I certainly expected *much* better from a college-level professor who is so well-known in the field. Introducing general audiences to the subject matter is one thing, doing so in such a plodding and pedestrian manner is another.

Indeed, I can summarize in one paragraph what the author egregiously stretches into a handful of chapters: The Neanderthals were not the brutes us moderns have stereotyped them as. They were patient and skillful hunters who used long spears to bring down their prey at very close range. They lived in a predatory environment and shifting climate. They were a quiet people whose way of life went virtually unchanged for two hundred thousand years. At one point they became extinct, and we don't quite know why.

There are other problems with this book, like the illustrations. For one example, look on page 65 where various hunting instruments are presented, labeled a through e, yet the caption only explains a through c.

I'm not claiming that Fagan is a poor writer; indeed, some of his imagined tales are quite vivid, but after enduring multiple descriptive variations on the exact same theme, it became rather tiresome (I'm pretty sure one of the author's favorite words is "flourished", and one of his pet phrases is "Thin on the ground"). And good grief, could he possibly having milked the ancients' tool kits any further? Fagan didn't re-visit the proverbial well once too often, he goes there a hundred times too often.

Overall, one has to wonder if there was an editor even assigned to this mishmash publication.

The author attempts to attach credibility to his insights by inserting certain tidbits here and there, like how he once entered the bush with an African hunter who missed an impala at ten feet range with an antique flintlock musket. In truth, I imagined how he stumbled through the hunt that required hours of patience only to fail, just like how Fagan forces the reader to stumble through his juvenile narrative that tries our patience, only to fail.

As another reviewer has noted, this work lacks any intellectual spark. Instead of expanding my curiosity, each subsequent chapter of CRO-MAGNON slowly drained all my interest, and thus I am setting the book aside unfinished.

In sum, the first part of CRO-MAGNON reads like a 'formula' work where the author had to meet a certain word count for his publisher. I hope that he does a much better job presenting the Cro-Magnons than he did the Neanderthals, but for now my patience is exhausted. If so, I will gladly update this review if I return to the book at some point in the future, but that remains in doubt.

For the time being, this is my first - and will be my last - book by this author.

The notion of Cro-Magnon's as "the first modern humans" is dubious and is debunked in detail by credible anthropologists and palentologists (Brace 2005, Stringer 2012, etc). The first anatomically modern humans evolved in Africa not the caves of Europe (Stringer 1012, Trinkhaus 2000, Mellars 2006, et al).

Equally dubious is the notion of Cro-Magnon's as "ancestors of today's Europeans." This too has been debunked. In fact, Cro-Magnon's bear several resemblances to Africans rather than today's white Europeans, as credible scholars note: QUOTE:

"the oft-repeated European feeling that the
Cro-Magnons are ``us'' (47) is more a product of
anthropological folklore than the result of the
metric data available from the skeletal remains."

--BRace et al, 2005. The Questionable Contribution...

"Nor does the picture get any clearer when we
move on to the Cro-Magnons, the presumed
ancestors of modern Europeans. Some were more
like present-day Australians or Africans, judged
by objective anatomical categorizations, as is
the case with some early modern skulls from the
Upper Cave at Zhoukoudian in China."
--(Christopher Stringer, Robin McKie (1998). African Exodus; The Origins Of Modern Humanity. (Pg. 162)

The same pattern is shown by limb proportion data by credible mainstream scholars- quote:

"Similarly, Cro-Magnon skeletons exhibit a
warm-adapted body stature, not the cold-adapted
formula seen in Neanderthals. This character may
be taken as strong evidence of the replacement
of Neanderthals and supports the single African
origin hypothesis."
--Roger Lewin. 2004. Human evolution: an illustrated introduction.

and- quote:

"As with all the other limb/trunk indices, the recent Europeans evince lower indices, reflective of shorter tibiae, and the recent sub-Saharan Africans have higher indices, reflective of their long tibiae... The Dolno Vestonice and Pavlov humans.. have body proportions similar to those of other Gravettian specimens. Specifically, they are characterized by high bracial and cural indices, indicative of distal limb segment elongation.."

--Trinkaus and Svoboda. 2005. Early Modern Human Evolution in Central Europe

AND respected anthropologist C. Loring Brace who examined cranial data made the debunking clear- QUOTE:

" "When canonical variates are plotted,neither sample ties in with Cro-Magnon as was once suggested. .. If this analysis shows nothing else, it demonstrates that the oft-repeated European feeling that the Cro-Magnons are "us" (46) is more a product of anthropological folklore than the result of the metric data available from the skeletal remains..."
--Brace, et al. The questionable contribution of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to European craniofacial form, Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006 January 3; 103(1): p. 242-247.)

Finally, the notion of "advanced" cognitive and behavioral patterns being some sort of "European" thing is also debunked by credible scholars. All of said "advances" were already in place WITHIN AFRICA long before any significant OOA migration out- QUOTE:

"Recent research has provided increasing support for the origins of anatomically
and genetically "modern" human populations in Africa between 150,000 and 200,000
years ago, followed by a major dispersal of these populations to both Asia and Europe
sometime after ca. 65,000 before present (B.P.). However, the central question of why it
took these populations {approx}100,000 years to disperse from Africa to other regions of
the world has never been clearly resolved. It is suggested here that the answer may lie
partly in the results of recent DNA studies of present-day African populations, combined
with a spate of new archaeological discoveries in Africa. Studies of both the mitochondrial
DNA (mtDNA) mismatch patterns in modern African populations and related mtDNA
lineage-analysis patterns point to a major demographic expansion centered broadly within
the time range from 80,000 to 60,000 B.P., probably deriving from a small geographical
region of Africa.

Recent archaeological discoveries in southern and eastern Africa suggest that, at approximately
the same time, [b]there was a major increase in the complexity of the technological, economic, social,
and cognitive behavior of certain African groups, [/b]which could have led to a major demographic
expansion of these groups in competition with other, adjacent groups. It is suggested that this
complex of behavioral changes (possibly triggered by the rapid environmental changes around
the transition from oxygen isotope stage 5 to stage 4) could have led not only to the expansion of
the L2 and L3 mitochondrial lineages over the whole of Africa but also to the ensuing dispersal of
these modern populations over most regions of Asia, Australasia, and Europe, and their replacement
(with or without interbreeding) of the preceding "archaic" populations in these regions."[/i]
---Mellars, Paul (2006) Why did modern human populations disperse from Africa ca. 60,000 years ago?
A new model. PNAS, 2006, 103(25), pp. 9381-9386

A few other reviewers have noted the shaky conjectures and repetitive "padding" of the text. Not surprising. Feel-good European history may raise self-esteem in some quarters, but it does not measure up to hard data.

This book provided me an opportunity to wonder about the origin of the human condition, embedded for approximately 37,000 years in Ice Age Europe. Brian Fagan’s writing is clear and easy to follow, and the author’s authority, as a long time Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, shines through. The best thing about this book is the author’s effort to stick to the anthropological and archeological data, while also allowing himself to imagine into historical conditions. Therefore, the writing combines science with thoughtful, modulated speculation.
The title term, Cro-Magnon, is a generic term that Brian Fagan uses to refer to Homo sapiens, the anatomically modern humans who migrated out of Africa and began to leave artifacts in Europe after 50,000 years ago. Before our species arrived in Europe, there had been a previous migration of different species of human beings out of Africa. These earliest, non-Homo sapien humans, culminated in the Neanderthals, so that when our species first entered Europe, the continent was already inhabited by other kinds of human beings.
Brian Fagan leads us on a journey that follows both the artifacts left by early human beings in Europe, and also follows his reasonable suppositions and deeply tutored imaginings about what life was like for both the Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens, as they occupied similar spaces, hunted similar animals, and endured under similar conditions. However, the Neanderthals disappeared, while our species has spread to seven billion people covering every continent. Fagan tries to find in the earliest traces left by these two groups an explanation for their startlingly different pathways, extinction vs. proliferation.
Fagan focuses our attention on the idea that Neanderthals were smart, tough and resilient, but neither verbal nor innovative. Their culture was stagnant for hundreds of thousands of years. Our direct ancestors, Homo sapiens, were not as strong, but possessed speech that enabled education and the transmission of culture across space and time. Homo sapiens were also innovative, and even the rare artifacts that they left in caves and in hunting sites tell us that over time their tools changed and they expressed themselves with artistic forms, most famously the cave paintings of Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira and elsewhere. Language, culture, constantly expanding social and trading networks, symbolic expression, and innovative response to challenge: these are the hallmarks that Brian Fagan finds in the thin residue of archeological remains from early Homo sapiens.
This book also emphasizes the important relationship of our human mind to our animal kin. For almost the entire length of the existence of our species, the main thing that we Homo sapiens have done to survive was to constantly watch and study the animals around us. During the Ice Age, animals were our main source of food and clothing. The only way to kill animals was to approach them closely. The bow and arrow was not invented until late in the Ice Age, and for the previous tens of thousands of years, human hunters spent their entire life making close approaches to animals like mammoths, herds of reindeer, herds of wild horses, and many other prey. Only with a thorough knowledge of the prey species’ behavior and reactions could a human hunter survive.
Fagan traces Ice Age human beings through cycles of climate change, cultural changes, and variation in animal prey, providing the reader with a sense of dynamism and change even among the earliest people. This book helped me understand the compelling fascination that wild animals exert upon all of us still, whenever we encounter a deer in Massachusetts, a moose in Maine, or a bear in Virginia.
The 2010 paperback edition that I have also includes an updated Preface that reminds us that although Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were different species, recent DNA studies show us that some interbreeding occurred. The scientific knowledge and the wise tone of voice with which Brian Fagan writes, will make you feel proud to be partly Neanderthal, delighted to be a Homo sapien, and intrigued by the wonder of how fur clad predators hunted with spears for tens of centuries in Ice Age Europe, and emerged as car driving, book reading people like us.
Paul R. Fleischman is the author of Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant.

It is an interesting read that has great deal of information. As far as anthropology and archeology I found it way too much speculative. Author also repeats himself over and over again when he makes comparisons between neanderthals and cro-magnons. There has been a lot more discoveries and science been done since the publication of this book. It is fun to read the stories of the writer's imagination at the beginning of each chapter but I would have expected a more factual and up to date information from the scholar of the author's caliber.

This book has a wonderful topic and interesting illustrations.The author makes up good stories about what might have happened, and I think that a smart child or teen ager would be captivated by the author's story telling. As it is though, and as I am an adult, I just can't finish the book; it is way too repetitive and speculative. For instance, he author likes to repeat himself endlessly about "tool kits" out of stone flakes. This is very interesting - the first time. Then I begin to skip ahead. And constantly describing the Neanderthals as "quiet" people is quite a leap of imagination. They might have been boisterous for all we know. Also, the drawings are mislabeled and confusing. And what is a "schist"? Maybe I read over that, but it's not in the index. Today I just decided to not finish the book after all.

This could have been a really great book. I'll give it a B-.

This book starts with a scene of a Cro-Magnon family walking along an Ice Age riverbank and briefly encountering a lone Neanderthal. No problem. The problem is that the author includes scores of such invented scenes, like the diorama hall at an old-fashioned museum. Worse, these scenes all run together. They show the same lifestyle, because it didn't change over millennia, and employ the same phrases. He uses the practices of modern groups like Inuit and San as models for both Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon lifestyles.

The author attributes the competitive disadvantage of Neanderthals to Cro-Magnons to a combination of inadequate language ability, inadequate social structures, inadequate innovation, and inadequate symbolic thought. With the exception of innovation, which might be inferred from a static tool kit, none of this has any basis in the physical record. The author's suppositions again seem based on too little evidence. Neanderthals are known to have the FOXP2 gene; there is no anatomical reason to assume they lacked language skills. We know that Neanderthals cared for their injured and old, because many fossils show people with healed major injuries, people who had been long crippled by arthritis or who had lost their teeth years before their death. Their brains were on average larger than Cro-Magnon, larger than our contemporary brains in fact, and we simply don't know how those brains processed the world they experienced.

I was put off by the degree of speculation and the repetitive language. Errors in diagram captions didn't help. I understand from other reviewers that Brian Fagan has written some fine books. This isn't one of them.

"Cro-Magnon" is an interesting book by Brian Fagan, whose primary approach to archaeology and pre-history is generally speaking that of the paleoclimatologist. Here, though he again examines the effects of extreme climate on human populations, he is primarily interested in the question of Neanderthal and early Sapiens and their cultural responses to the environment, especially in respect to the extinction of the former and the spread of the latter. He paints a rather more different picture of the two than the usual, since he almost sees the Neanderthal as simply moving away from extreme climate while the Cro-Magnon embraces it. I'm not certain I agree with that, since the earlier species spread and flourished for several thousands of years in a climate of widely swinging temperature domains before the arrival of Cro-Magnon and seemed to exhibit a suite of cultural traits that enhanced that survival.

Even though the presence of two populations of humans placing demands on limited resources was bound to produce a differential in survival, I'm more inclined to agree with Clive Finlayson ([[ASIN:0199239193 The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived]]) who suggests that chance played a greater part in the process. Both Dr. Fagan and Dr. Finlayson note that both types of human ended up disbursed among various residual domains of habitability during climatic downturns, some with less interconnectivity than others. Dr. Finlayson, however, places a greater emphasises on the resulting isolation and its pronounced effect on genetic variability and overall decline in species viability. The cul-de-sac into which Neanderthals found themselves during the last glacial maximum may simply have reduced a stressed breeding population beyond its capacity to survive, with or without the pressures of a rival species in the environment.

Observations on evolutionary tracks and other phenomena, where events of different magnitudes are possible and can have major effects on outcomes, have been made by a number of researchers in other fields under the rubrics of "self organizing criticality" (Stuart Kaufman and the Sante Fe Institute, [[ASIN:0195079515 The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution]] and Per Bak ([[ASIN:038798738X how nature works: the science of self-organized criticality]]) and "complexity or ubiquity theory" (Mark Buchanan (Used & New from: $7.00 [[ASIN:060960810X Ubiquity: The Science of History . . . or Why the World Is Simpler Than We Think]) and [[ASIN:0609809989 Ubiquity: Why Catastrophes Happen]]) and the resulting concepts suggest that chance occurrences can indeed have exactly this type of effect on natural systems, including species survival. When it comes down to which species made it through to modern times, it may have been as much a matter of "shear dumb luck" as it was of increased cultural complexity and changes in mental outlook. In fact even our understanding of the differences and similarities which may have existed between the cultures and mental realities of the two populations is as much the outcome of a differential in chance survival of artifactual remains as it is of actual quantifiable differences in the two species of human.

Our sense of superiority, not only to extinct species of our own genus but to our existing distant cousins the great apes, may only be an illusion in the long run of things. I think it's very telling that most genera have more than one species, and that genera that don't are usually those that have undergone or are undergoing serious stress of some kind. Our uniqueness as a species in the world may not be such a good sign.
Nature doesn't care about our ego or our technological successes; it only cares about numbers and sustainability. Our short run of success may ultimately be leading to our final demise as our numbers bring pressure to bear on sustainability and lead to collapse.

Interesting book.

the perfect follow up to a couple of books on Neanderthal history and genetics, it give me the sense of continuity that I seek regarding my own existence. It's a lot of speculation added to the spotty archeological evidence, but it's well thought out speculation and probably some of it is close enough to the reality that we will never really know to make me think "yeah, I'm one of them most likely, and it was under the proposed conditions that my own genes were filtered to make me what I am. I may live in the soft world of civilization, but I'm built from raw meat, nuts, and the most highly evolved hunting skills ever uncovered." Pretty nice to understand how I am made from people who lived in cave's, sheltered only by furs and fire.

I am stunned that this book was written by an anthropology professor. It reads as if written by an amateur with more imagination than writing prowess or specific knowledge. I'm not even sure where to begin. I was so happy to discover this book, and sat down to read. Very quickly, it became apparent that science had been sacrificed before the altar of fanciful thinking. To be clear, I expected some educated speculation. In a field with so many historical gaps, such speculation is necessary. But the speculation must be just that, educated. Reasonable interpolations and extrapolations based on evidence. But this book? Fanciful, as I said. Here is one paragraph that demonstrates what I mean:

"We can imagine a bright Cro-Magnon hearth in the heart of an open campsite on the plains in high summer, skin tents pitched on the perimeter. The people are dancing to a drum and flute, their profiles shimmering in the long shadows of the hearth. They are under the spell of the dance, oblivious to the small group of Neanderthals , who are watching silently and invisibly just outside the circle of tents and firelight. When the dance ends, they will slip away without a sound, yet subconsciously the Cro-Magnons know they are there."

The paragraph starts out okay, with a little speculation, but then becomes increasingly absurd. Fagan knows what was in the Cro-Magnons' subconscious? This is just one example. The entire book reads like this. Maddening.

Fagan also likes making statements that seem inexplicably contradictory. For example: "Both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons coped effortlessly with abrupt climate changes from near-temperature to extremely frigid conditions. How well, however, the Neanderthals were able to deal with deep snow cover and long months of subzero temperatures is a matter of ongoing debate." So, Neanderthals coped "effortlessly" when the weather became frigid, but didn't cope well when the frigid weather then continued? Again, many dozens of similar examples exist throughout the book. Enough to make a rational person's brain ache.

Fagan repeatedly calls Neanderthals "human beings." They weren't human beings. That term is reserved for homo sapiens.

The writing itself, as mentioned earlier, is glaringly amateurish. Garbled, circuitous, and just plain clunky. Fagan takes pages and pages to convey, in a confusing way, what could be written clearly and concisely in a single paragraph.

If you are looking for an interesting book about Cro-Magnons, one that is well-written and scientific, and whose speculations are logical continuations of the science, then this book isn't for you.

As the author states, most of what we believe about our ancient ancestors, the Cro-Magnon (cave people), has been teased out of clues found in stone, bone, and the climatological records buried in ice cores, tree rings and isotope ratios. The book is an attempt to reveal the realities of life in the Ice Age, and the forces at play in selecting anatomically modern humans over Neanderthals.

Along the way, the author dismisses some of the myths and stereotypes of these two "competing" hominid groups. Neanderthals were fleet, agile creatures who relied on their proven technologies and traditions. Cro-Magnons tended to be a bit more diminutive, but far more resourceful, bringing to bear superior cognitive abilities. Where the Neanderthal wore animal skins for warmth, and used fire to harden the points on their spears; Cro-Magnon donned tailored garments, painted cavern walls, developed extensive social networks (for the time), and turned stone and bone into a wide variety of tools and weapon points.

One of the greatest inventions of the Cro-Magnon was the eyed-needle, usually carved out of bone or ivory. With such a tool, garments could be fashioned which were both warm and water tight, and could be removed or adjusted to suit the current conditions or activity. The book contains many fascinating examples of how Cro-Magnon adapted and improvised their way to become the dominant macroscopic creature on the planet.

One criticism that may be leveled at the book is its Euro-centric point of view. While there is some mention of Africa and Asia, the vast majority of the book deals with what is now Europe and the Near East. This is likely because this is where the author has drawn his evidence, and where the most research (archaeological digs) has been conducted.

Interspersed throughout the chapters, are short scenes of what life was probably like during each era discussed. These give a richer flavor to the otherwise drier academic exposition of findings, debates, conjecture and evidence. And yet without the academic presentation, one might justly wonder where such fanciful fictions come from.

On the whole, the book conveys the origins and history of the ongoing modern human saga. It is a history book about pre-history, about nameless ancestors who struggled valiently, survived, and thus succeed at the game of life. Such were the people who came before us, who made us who and what we are. We owe them the respect of gratitude and awe for overcoming extreme adversity. And we can thank Mr. Fagan for taking such pains to convey their story to us.