Word: cro
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...images of bison, mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, of a panther, an owl, even a hyena. Done on the rock walls with plain earth pigments-red, black, ocher-they are of singular vitality and power, and despite their inscrutability to modern eyes, they will greatly enrich our picture of Cro-Magnon life and culture...
...span of human prehistory, the Cro-Magnon people who drew the profusion of animals on the bulging limestone walls of the Chauvet cave were fairly late arrivals. Human technology-the making of tools from stone-had already been in existence for nearly 2 million years. There are traces of symbolism and ritual in burial sites of Neanderthals, an earlier species, dating back to 100,000 B.P. (before the present). Not only did the placement of the bodies seem meaningful, but so did the surrounding pebbles and bones with fragmentary patterns scratched on them. These, says Clottes, "do indicate that...
Though the dates are vastly generalized, most prehistorians seem to agree that art-communication by visual images-came into existence somewhere around 40,000 B.P. That was about the time when Cro-Magnons, Homo sapiens, reached Ice Age Europe, having migrated from the Middle East. Some experts think the Cro-Magnons brought a weapon that made Neanderthals an evolutionary has-been: a more advanced brain, equipped with a large frontal lobe "wired" for associative thinking. For art, at its root, is association-the power to make one thing stand for and symbolize another, to create the agreements by which some...
...Cro-Magnons were not the inarticulate Alley Oops of popular myth. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers with a fairly developed technology. They wore animal-skin clothing and moccasins tailored with bone needles, and made beautiful (and highly efficient) laurel-leaf-shaped flint blades. Living in small groups, they constructed tents from skins, and huts from branches and (in what is now Eastern Europe) mammoth bones...
...standard classification. And the fact that they live in the region adjoining the famous Lascaux and Altamira caves, which contain vivid paintings from Europe's early hunter- gatherers, leads Cavalli-Sforza to a tantalizing conclusion: "The Basques are extremely likely to be the most direct descendants of the Cro-Magnon people, among the first modern humans in Europe." All Europeans are thought to be a hybrid population, with 65% Asian and 35% African genes...