Four dots move along a riverbank in a black and gray Ice Age landscape of 40,000 years ago, the only sign of life on a cold, late autumn day. Dense morning mist swirls gently over the slow-moving water, stirring fitfully in an icy breeze. Pine trees crowd on the riverbank, close to a large clearing where aurochs and bison paw through the snow for fodder. The fur-clad Cro-Magnon family moves slowly—a hunter with a handful of spears, his wife carrying a leather bag of dried meat, a son and daughter. The five-year old boy dashes to and fro brandishing a small spear. His older sister stays by her mother, also carrying a skin bag. A sudden gust lifts the clinging gloom on the far side of the stream. Suddenly, the boy shouts and points, then runs in terror to his mother. The children burst into tears and cling to her. A weathered, hirsute face with heavy brows stares out quietly from the undergrowth on the other bank. Expressionless, yet watchful, its Neanderthal owner stands motionless, seemingly obvious to the cold. The father looks across, waves his spear and shrugs. The face vanishes as silently as it had appeared.
As light snow falls, the family resume their journey, the father as always watchful, eyes never still. During the climb to the rock shelter, he tells his children about their elusive, quiet neighbors, rarely seen and almost never encountered face-to-face. There had been more of them in his father’s and grandfather’s day, when he had seen them for the first time. Now sightings are unusual, especially in the cold months. They are people different from us, he explains. They do not speak like we do; we cannot understand them, but they never do us any harm. We just ignore them . . . .
Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals: this most classic of historical confrontations, sometimes couched in terms of brutish savagery versus human sophistication, has fascinated archaeologists for generations. On the one side stand primordial humans, endowed with great strength and courage, possessed of the simplest of clothing and weaponry. We speculate that they were incapable of fully articulate speech and had relatively limited intellectual powers. On the other are the Cro-Magnons, the first anatomically modern Europeans, with fully modern brains and linguistic abilities, a penchant for innovation, and all the impressive cognitive skills of Homo sapiens. They harvest game large and small effortlessly with highly efficient weapons and enjoy a complex, sophisticated relationship with their environment, their prey, and the forces of the supernatural world. We know that the confrontation ended with the extinction of the Neanderthals, perhaps about 30,000 years ago. But how it unfolded remains one of the most challenging and fascinating of all Ice Age mysteries.
The Neanderthals appeared on the academic stage with the discovery of a brow-ridged skull of a seemingly primitive human in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1856. Seven years later, Thomas Henry Huxley’s brilliant study of the cranium in his Man’s Place in Nature compared the Neanderthal fossil with humankind’s primate relatives, chimpanzees and gorillas. The thought of a human ancestry among the apes horrified many Victorians. Public opinion erected a vast chasm between archaic humanity, epitomized by the Neander Valley skull, and the modern humans discovered in the Cro-Magnon rock shelter at Les Eyzies in southwestern France in 1868. The Neanderthals became primitive cave people armed with clubs, dragging their mates around by their long hair. Unfortunately, the stereotype persists to this day.
Cutting-edge science paints a very different portrait of the Neanderthals. They were strong, agile people, who thrived in a harsh, often extremely cold Europe, from the shores of the Atlantic deep into Eurasia, from the edges of the steppe to warmer, drier environments in the Near East. Neanderthal hunters stalked dangerous, large animals like bison, then killed them with heavy thrusting spears. They didn’t have the luxury of standing off at a distance and launching light spears at their prey. Their hunting territories were small; they were thin on the ground; the routine of their lives changed infinitesimally from one year to the next. But, for all their strength and skill, they were no matches for the Cro-Magnon newcomers, who, science tells us, spread rapidly across Europe around 45,000 years ago.
When they arrived in their new homeland, the Cro-Magnons were us, members of a species with a completely unprecedented relationship with the world around them. Every Cro-Magnon family, every band, was drenched in symbolism, expressed in numerous ways. Well before 30,000 years ago, Cro-Magnons were creating engravings and paintings on the walls of caves and rock shelters. They crafted subtle and beautiful carvings on bone and antler, and kept records by incising intricate notations on bone plaques. We know that they used bone flutes at least 35,000 years ago, and, if they did this, they surely sang and danced in deep caves, by firelight on winter evenings, and at summer gatherings. Cro-Magnons ornamented their bodies and buried their dead with elaborate grave goods for use in an afterlife. No one doubts that Cro-Magnon symbolic expression somehow reflects their notion of their place in the natural world. But their perceived relationship to nature was radically poles apart from our own—they were hunter-gatherers and lived in a world that was unimaginably different from today’s Europe. And their perceptions of the world, of existence, were radically different from, and infinitely more sophisticated than those of the Neanderthals.
Cro-Magnon briefly explores the ancestry of the Neanderthals and the world in which they lived, then tries to answer the question of questions: what did happen when Cro-Magnon confronted Neanderthal? Did the moderns slaughter them on sight, or did they simply annex prime hunting territories and push their ancient occupants onto marginal lands, where they slowly perished? Or did the superior mental abilities, hunting weapons, and weaponry of the Cro-Magnons give them a decisive advantage in an increasingly cold late Ice Age world? Do we know what kinds of contacts took place between Neanderthal and newcomer? Did the two populations intermarry occasionally, trade with one another, even borrow hunting methods, technologies, and ideas from each other?
The answers to these questions revolve as much around the Cro-Magnons as they do the Neanderthals. Despite a century-and-a-half of increasingly sophisticated research, the first modern inhabitants of Europe remain a shadowy presence, defined more by their remarkable art traditions and thousands of stone artifacts than by the nature of their lives as hunters and foragers, defined by the Ice Age world in which they flourished. Cro-Magnon paints a portrait of these remarkable people fashioned on a far wider canvas than that of artifacts and cave paintings.
