CRO-MAGNON MAN: CHARACTERISTICS, LIFE AND DIET - HISTORY - 2025

The Cro-Magnon man is the kind of human being closer to the actual human in the evolutionary chain. Their footprints dating back to about 50 thousand years have been found. He was the first to tame fire, cook his meals and was able to string together stories and transfer them orally to his offspring.

Cro-Magnon man came to enter the difficult terrain of ethics and philosophy, and lived with the man of Neanderthal. This specimen left information about its ways of life and cultural aspects in the cave paintings that have been found in various caves.

Cro-Magnon man male skull

Lartet's discovery

Almost 150 years ago, in March 1869, the French geologist Louis Lartet found five skeletons that made history.

Lartet was analyzing a cave for research funded by Henry Christy. The latter was one of the fathers of archeology and anthropology, the son of a family of bankers who dedicated himself to adventure and travel for archaeological purposes.

Louis Lartet was with other people on one of his trips to the southeast of France. He was in a cave called Cro-Magnon, near Les Eyzie de Tayac Sireuil, in the Dordogne. There they found the skeletons of three adult males, a woman and a fetus. This discovery came to shock the world.

Characteristics of the Cro-Magnon man

Physical

- The tallest skeleton measured 1.80 meters.

- He had a prominent chin.

- It had 1590 cms ³ of cranial capacity.

The closest to these characteristics was in the Neardental men, who were a group of hominids that lived in Central Europe about 300,000 years ago.

Cultural

The Cro-Magnon man came to star in the Paleolithic in a time that was described as the Age of the Reindeer. His tracks were left on the walls of many caves where the cave painting still remains. These creations are visual accounts of hunting animals, strategies, techniques and even celebrations.

For some anthropologists these paintings are part of a didactic circuit. They are considered a kind of ancient graffiti intended to teach the art of hunting. For others, they are part of religious rituals: when the event is painted on a wall, it is magically captured and, therefore, conquered.

Finally, other historians interpret the cave paintings as the first condensed accounts of humanity.

Artists understand these paintings as the first aesthetic cultural manifestations. For their part, for many communication scientists such manifestations are stories that preceded the written language: the first media discourses.

Lifestyle

The Cro-Magnon man lived in Europe, Asia and Africa. She was semi nomadic; that is, it did not become totally sedentary or stay in one place, but neither did it live in constant motion.

Hunting and gathering were their basic ways of life. He hunted large animals in a group, while the smaller ones he caught by setting traps.

The hunt was reserved for men and the gathering of fruits was in the hands of women and children. In addition, they knew how to work stone and developed tools and weapons.

Social organization

Just as the Cro-Magnon made contributions to art, it also contributed to the construction of history by giving rise to the spoken word.

It is important to remember that language is characterized by its symbolic capacity. It generates sounds that immediately evoke ideas, shapes, objects, emotions, and situations. That evocation, that giving meaning to each sound, is only achieved if there are agreements between beings of the same species.

Once that is done, then an exchange with other species can also take place. The requirement is the capacity for abstraction sufficiently developed to accept the symbolism and its meaning.

Oral communication

Cro-Magnon man went from the articulation of sounds to the semantic complexity of making sense of sounds. He created articulated language and that originates organization, because being able to share leads to agreement and the end result is social organization.

Thanks to this language, the paintings and rituals were shared and had a meaning. Above the material culture (tools and infrastructure), these groups of semi-nomadic beings began to be one.

A shared culture is born, with habits, traditions and customs, and important information for survival begins to be transmitted from generation to generation.

Meta-stories

It is the moment of the emergence of the first meta-stories, in which the epics of men and women are told. They are stories to have a common origin and a shared search that spoke about the origins of human groups.

They also sought answers for existential anguishes, doubts, and concerns. Religions appeared to calm the gaps or potholes in knowledge, and also as a balm of hope to face difficult situations.

The word with meaning gives rise to a new step in evolution. From that moment on they will not be small groups, but peoples and tribes with a common past, a shared vision and joint dreams.

Mental evolution

The Cro-Magnon, taller and slimmer than the Neanderthal, will depend less on its physical strength and instinct. Now your strength is in the knowledge acquired and shared.

From that moment on, evolution will begin to be mental rather than physical. It will be the brain, reasoning, logic, data and experience that will start to grow.

The Cro-Magnons were semi-nomadic, and language, with all its wealth and subtleties, led them to the next stage: building infrastructure.

Feeding

José Manuel Gómez Tabanera, a researcher at the University of Oviedo, Spain, investigated the feeding of the Cro-Magnon and its relationship with the evolutionary leap of this specimen. The results of his study are presented in the work The Human Diet in the Pleistocene.

When a species has problems feeding itself, the first thing that suffers is its perpetuation. If the female is not well fed, an amenorrhea occurs. This leads to non-ovulation and thus sterility occurs.

Effects of glaciation

In the times of the ice ages, when the planet froze, animals disappeared to be hunted and bodies grew thin. The individuals were able to resist for some time, but it was impossible to generate offspring. In relation to hunting and fishing, food spoils if there is no way to preserve it.

However, a society that learns to communicate efficiently also begins to share techniques, invent, innovate and seek survival. Storing and preserving food is part of that survival.

By having more nutritional variety on hand, even in times of harsh environments, the female can fill her fat deposits. The gray matter of the brain increases in size, secretes leptin, activates the hormonal system and increases your fertility.

Planned diet

The presence of fire and salt support the theory of diet change. A more consistent, planned and organized diet led the Cro-Magnon to guarantee its permanence on the planet.

Proteins, vegetables and minerals, in addition to the possibility of cooking the food to make it more digestible, helped the development of the species.

On the other hand, the Cro-Magnon could agree; he knew fire, produced his own tools and developed pottery. They even developed a lunar calendar that allowed them to plan plantings. These are important advantages to guarantee the next step: an organized society.

At that moment the first division of labor occurred. Agriculture and livestock appeared, as well as the manufacture of skin protection - clothing.

This social organization led to the construction of different habitats within the same caves. And the Cro-Magnon man welcomed his new leap, Homo sapiens; that is, the human being as we know him today.

Differences between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal

Apparently Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons coexisted for a few centuries. There are even specialists who point out that they tried to integrate and have children in the Asian area.

Among the main differences are:

- The Neanderthals were larger.

- The Neandentals had more strength.

- Cro-Magnons were less robust but taller than Neanderthals.

- The skull was more bulky in the Neanderthals.

Disappearance of the Neanderthal

There are several hypotheses about the disappearance of the man from Neardental. Some of those that are handled are a virus, the inability to reproduce or the inability to adapt to climate change.

The truth is that they had many things in common with the Cro-Magnon man. For example, they showed concern for life after death and for transcendence; this led them to perform complex funeral rites. They also shared beautician concepts and body decorations.

With the arrival of the last ice age, about 12 thousand years ago, the Cro-Magnons gave way to Homo sapiens. Then the history of mankind began.

References

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