Questions and answers about Cro-Magnon:
What got you into the Cro-Magnons?
I first learned about these fascinating late Ice Age people back at Cambridge University when I was an undergraduate. I was fortunate enough to take a course under an elderly Stone Age archaeologist, Miles Burkitt, who had worked under the legendary Abbé Henri Breuil in French caves before World War I. Burkitt was a wonderful storyteller and breathed life into what can be a very dry subject—Stone Age archaeology. I visited Southwestern France while an undergraduate, dug briefly at La Quina, a Neanderthal rock shelter, and subsequently have returned and seen many other sites and rock art locations on many other occasions. A visit to Les Eyzies, which calls itself “the capital of prehistory”, three years ago took me to the museum there, which is remarkable for its long lines of stone artifacts. Then and there, I decided to write a book about the Cro-Magnons for a general, English-speaking audience.
What’s different about your book?
The Cro-Magnons—the first anatomically modern humans in Europe—are famous for their paintings and engravings at places like Altamira, Lascaux, and Grotte de Chauvet, but there is almost no popular literature that describes them as anything other than hunters and artists in the most general terms. Cro-Magnon is more concerned with them on a much broader canvas—their ultimate origins in tropical Africa, their tentative, then rapid, settlement of Europe, their complex relationships with the indigenous Neanderthals, and the ways in which they adapted to the harsh, ever changing late Ice climate of their homeland. Then, of course, here’s also the story of their seemingly effortless adjustment to global warming at the end of the Ice Age, after 15,000 years ago. The Cro-Magnons’ artistic achievements are only part of a much more complex historical tapestry. They are, after all, the ancestors of many modern Europeans.
You’ve written a great deal about ancient climate change What part did climate change play in this story?
A huge, but inconspicuous part. Contrary to popular belief, the Ice Age was not a monolithic deep freeze, quite the contrary. The span of history covered by Cro-Magnon extends across the last warm interglacial and the bitter cold of the last Ice Age glaciation. Even the latter was remarkable for its constant fluctuations from near modern conditions to extreme cold. Both the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons adapted to extremely savage European climate with astonishing ease, but it seems that the moderns with their tailored clothing and highly flexible, lightweight tool kit were better able to swing with the climatic punches, perhaps one reason why the Neanderthals became extinct about 30,000 years ago. Quite apart from warm and cold, there were other important factors such as drought, and, above all, two cataclysmic volcanic eruptions. The Mt. Toba eruption in Southeast Asia nearly wiped out modern humanity 73,000 years ago. Another lesser eruption near Naples in Italy about 42,000 years ago, affected Cro-Magnon populations as they settled in Europe.
Did humans have any effect on climatic changes during the late Ice Age?
No, there were too few of us on the ground, nor were we using fossil fuels.
What about the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons? How did the newcomers deal with their ancient neighbors?
A large part of this book deals with this relationship, pointing out that the Neanderthals were very ancient Europeans indeed, while the Cro-Magnons were newcomers. It seems almost certain that the Neanderthals and moderns did not interbreed: their genes are incompatible. We have to remember that both groups were thin on the ground—something it is hard for us to imagine in our crowded world. Contacts, let alone sightings, must have been relatively rare occurrences. They probably had no common way of communicating, except, perhaps with grunts and gestures. I suspect they often avoided one another, although watchful, and argue that, in the end, it was the superior intellectual and technological skills of the Cro-Magnons that marginalized the Neanderthals. Eventually, their numbers became too small to support breeding populations and they vanished. There certainly weren’t wars to the death or such dramatic events.
What’s new in Cro-Magnon research?
This is an exciting time, for a new generation of research methods is yielding rich dividends. Much more precise radiocarbon dates are revolutionizing our knowledge of the first modern settlement of Europe. They are even dating individual cave paintings. Fine-grained climatic data is highlighting the role of small-scale climatic shifts in late Ice Age life. We’re learning a great deal about such esoteric topics as the sources of tool making stone, sea shells, and the vegetation of the day. Scientists from dozens of academic disciplines are contributing to a new portrait of the late Ice Age.
What was the most striking research you encountered during the writing of this book?
I think it was two things--the new precision of radiocarbon dating, and the extraordinary impact of major volcanic eruptions on the course of late Ice Age history. These eruptions were virtually unknown a decade ago. Multidisciplinary science conjured them up from nowhere!
What book are you planning to write next?
I’m working on a major book on ancient societies’ relationships to water over the past 5,000 years.
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