Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans Paperback – May 10, 2011

Anyone interested in human origins will find this book by Brian Fagan a must-read. Fagan combines clear outlines of the latest research on the first true humans in Europe with descriptive passages that create a novelistic impression of their challenging lives as hunter-gatherers. The combination makes for reading that is both informative and entertaining. He uses the term "Cro-Magnon" in his title because it is the more readily identifiable term to non-scientists for the species that lived at the same time as the Neanderthals, and eventually outlasted them. Despite the Neanderthals' remarkable staying power for almost 50,000 years during the climatic oscillations of the Ice Ages, it was the more adaptable and innovative Cro-Magnons or true humans as they are most often called today, who prevailed. Fagan is one of the foremost authors of books that examine the effects of climate changes on early humans and civilizations, a focus that has particular relevance today. The effect that even minor variations in climate could have on the early humans' ability to survive in some areas of Europe is examined in detail. As critical game species the hunting cultures relied on died out or migrated elsewhere, once-thriving areas became places where people increasingly lived on the edge. At the same time, Fagan shows how the great variation in Cro-Magnon culture made the first humans more creative, leading them to develop and share better hunting tools and methods that made their survival possible. This book is a welcome compendium of that key turning point in human history.

This book provided me an opportunity to wonder about the origin of the human condition, embedded for approximately 37,000 years in Ice Age Europe. Brian Fagan’s writing is clear and easy to follow, and the author’s authority, as a long time Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, shines through. The best thing about this book is the author’s effort to stick to the anthropological and archeological data, while also allowing himself to imagine into historical conditions. Therefore, the writing combines science with thoughtful, modulated speculation.
The title term, Cro-Magnon, is a generic term that Brian Fagan uses to refer to Homo sapiens, the anatomically modern humans who migrated out of Africa and began to leave artifacts in Europe after 50,000 years ago. Before our species arrived in Europe, there had been a previous migration of different species of human beings out of Africa. These earliest, non-Homo sapien humans, culminated in the Neanderthals, so that when our species first entered Europe, the continent was already inhabited by other kinds of human beings.
Brian Fagan leads us on a journey that follows both the artifacts left by early human beings in Europe, and also follows his reasonable suppositions and deeply tutored imaginings about what life was like for both the Neanderthals and the Homo sapiens, as they occupied similar spaces, hunted similar animals, and endured under similar conditions. However, the Neanderthals disappeared, while our species has spread to seven billion people covering every continent. Fagan tries to find in the earliest traces left by these two groups an explanation for their startlingly different pathways, extinction vs. proliferation.
Fagan focuses our attention on the idea that Neanderthals were smart, tough and resilient, but neither verbal nor innovative. Their culture was stagnant for hundreds of thousands of years. Our direct ancestors, Homo sapiens, were not as strong, but possessed speech that enabled education and the transmission of culture across space and time. Homo sapiens were also innovative, and even the rare artifacts that they left in caves and in hunting sites tell us that over time their tools changed and they expressed themselves with artistic forms, most famously the cave paintings of Lascaux, Chauvet, Altamira and elsewhere. Language, culture, constantly expanding social and trading networks, symbolic expression, and innovative response to challenge: these are the hallmarks that Brian Fagan finds in the thin residue of archeological remains from early Homo sapiens.
This book also emphasizes the important relationship of our human mind to our animal kin. For almost the entire length of the existence of our species, the main thing that we Homo sapiens have done to survive was to constantly watch and study the animals around us. During the Ice Age, animals were our main source of food and clothing. The only way to kill animals was to approach them closely. The bow and arrow was not invented until late in the Ice Age, and for the previous tens of thousands of years, human hunters spent their entire life making close approaches to animals like mammoths, herds of reindeer, herds of wild horses, and many other prey. Only with a thorough knowledge of the prey species’ behavior and reactions could a human hunter survive.
Fagan traces Ice Age human beings through cycles of climate change, cultural changes, and variation in animal prey, providing the reader with a sense of dynamism and change even among the earliest people. This book helped me understand the compelling fascination that wild animals exert upon all of us still, whenever we encounter a deer in Massachusetts, a moose in Maine, or a bear in Virginia.
The 2010 paperback edition that I have also includes an updated Preface that reminds us that although Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were different species, recent DNA studies show us that some interbreeding occurred. The scientific knowledge and the wise tone of voice with which Brian Fagan writes, will make you feel proud to be partly Neanderthal, delighted to be a Homo sapien, and intrigued by the wonder of how fur clad predators hunted with spears for tens of centuries in Ice Age Europe, and emerged as car driving, book reading people like us.
Paul R. Fleischman is the author of Wonder: When and Why the World Appears Radiant.

For the book alone I would have rated this as five stars,but too many egregious errors cost it a star. Words divided into three, causing the reader to stop ... The absence of color plates referenced in the text... Odd paragraph breaks in the midst of a sentence... These suggest that editors did not actually read this book, but relied on machine-editing instead of doing their job. That said, Fagan's writing is always a pleasure. I have studied archaeology for 30 years and still learn from Professor Fagan.

It is an interesting read that has great deal of information. As far as anthropology and archeology I found it way too much speculative. Author also repeats himself over and over again when he makes comparisons between neanderthals and cro-magnons. There has been a lot more discoveries and science been done since the publication of this book. It is fun to read the stories of the writer's imagination at the beginning of each chapter but I would have expected a more factual and up to date information from the scholar of the author's caliber.

the perfect follow up to a couple of books on Neanderthal history and genetics, it give me the sense of continuity that I seek regarding my own existence. It's a lot of speculation added to the spotty archeological evidence, but it's well thought out speculation and probably some of it is close enough to the reality that we will never really know to make me think "yeah, I'm one of them most likely, and it was under the proposed conditions that my own genes were filtered to make me what I am. I may live in the soft world of civilization, but I'm built from raw meat, nuts, and the most highly evolved hunting skills ever uncovered." Pretty nice to understand how I am made from people who lived in cave's, sheltered only by furs and fire.