If you enjoyed reading about the adventures of Jean Auel’s character Ayla in the “Clan of the Cave Bear” series of books, you have a good idea of what life was like for Cro-Magnon man. Ayla lived during this period.
Cro-Magnon man has been classified Homo sapiens sapiens. He lived between 10,000 to 45,000 years ago, according to www.elephant.se. This was during the Upper Paleolithic period. During some of this time, Neanderthals also occupied Europe and parts of western Asia.
The Cro Magnon cave at Dordogne, France is the site where Louis Lartet and Henry Christy discovered the remains of five skeletons in 1868. The remains represented one adult female, three adult males and one infant. Scientists theorize that Cro-Magnon man probably developed in Asia, then migrated to Europe and co-existed with Neanderthal man. Some believe the bands eventually forced Neanderthals into extinction.
Cro-Magnon groups flourished in southern Europe during the last glacial age. The popular image of a Cro-Magnon man as a brutish sort with a club is somewhat of a false stereotype. Tall and slender like modern human beings, he had a thin, rounded skull with no brow ridges, a high forehead and a projecting chin. His brain size was apparently around the same as ours. Since the anatomy of Cro-Magnon mouths was nearly identical to ours, anthropologists assume these ancestors of human beings could speak.
Excavations of various sites shows that Cro-Magnons hunted, mainly using spears. They made blades from flint to prepare animal skins. Art typically shows them wearing wrapped skins fashioned like clothing. Based on the skeletal injuries anthropologists observed, however, Cro-Magnon individuals led a tough life.
The bands wore pierced shells, tooth and bone pendants as ornaments. As a society, they were very artistic, fashioning ritual bone statuettes and voluptuous Venus-like figures. They are perhaps best known for their drawings of wooly rhinos, mammoths, cave lions and cave bears on cave walls.
Cro-Magnon man apparently liked to use colors such as red, black and brown. These were derived from various types of berries and other material such as fire coals. They apparently held feasts and favored a variety of hoofed animals such as reindeer, roe deer and horses.
Although Cro-Magnons were part of a hunting culture, they are also considered semi-nomadic, trailing the movements of animals during various seasons. In particular, they hunted mammoths and might in fact have contributed to the extinction of this animal. They constructed huts and other dwellings from mammoth bones and lined them with limestone slabs. Archaeological analysis of their teeth shows that while they were definitely carnivorous, they also ate a wide range of plants.
