Europe's first lasting modern humans were named after a railway roadworks find
In 1868, workers cutting a road toward a railway station in the Dordogne stumbled on a rock shelter. Inside, Louis Lartet found five skeletons, and the spot's name, Cro-Magnon, became the label for Europe's early modern humans: taller, bigger-brained and broader-faced than most people alive today, and darker-skinned than modern Europeans.
The oldest trace of these newcomers comes from Mandrin Cave in southern France, where modern human teeth sit alongside Neronian stone tools; a 2022 study put their age at 51,700 to 56,800 years. When they arrived, Neanderthals had held the continent for hundreds of thousands of years. The two groups met and interbred, and the Neanderthals were gone by 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. Oddly, those Neanderthals already carried around 6% sapiens ancestry from an even older encounter, more than 240,000 years back.
Bodies of that era looked different from ours. Cro-Magnons had heavier brow ridges, larger teeth and bigger brains than most living populations, and selection for paler skin only got going roughly 30,000 years ago. Before the coldest phase of the Ice Age, groups lived thinly spread, stood about as tall as post-industrial people, and moved goods along trade networks reaching up to 900 km. Neither they nor the Neanderthals usually lived past 40, though Cro-Magnon numbers grew far larger, perhaps thanks to higher fertility.
Climate kept rewriting their world. Around 21,000 years ago, at the Last Glacial Maximum, ice buried Scandinavia, the Baltic and the British Isles, sea ice crept to the French coast, and most of Europe turned to polar desert. Populations split: Solutrean people in the southwest invented new tools for permafrost country, while Epigravettian groups from Italy eastward adapted older Gravettian kit. On the East European Plain, Gravettian builders had already raised big huts out of mammoth bones. When the glaciers pulled back about 20,000 years ago, Magdalenian people spread back into western and central Europe.
Their creative output was wide: cave paintings, Venus figurines, carved animals, beads, and clothing woven from plant fibre and coloured with plant dyes. They blew bone flutes and whistles, and may have spun bullroarers or beaten drums. Early interpreters took such remains for people drowned in the biblical Flood; later, 19th-century race theorists claimed them, ideas that collapsed by the mid-20th century.
Source: Cro-Magnon
