Word: magnon
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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...
...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...
...prehistoric Lascaux caves in France's Dordogne region were closed in 1963 because the presence of tourists was destroying the 17,000-year-old paintings on their walls. Now Lascaux II, a replica built nearby in 1983 to give visitors a sense of the Cro-Magnon artwork, has become so overcrowded that entry is limited to 2,000 a day. The great Cathedral of Notre Dame in the heart of Paris has yet to take such extreme measures, but it may soon have to: more than 11.5 million people visited the church last year to admire its Gothic architecture...
After quickly tracing the development of life from the first crude cells (which cry "Free! *&#! We're free!" as they "colonize the open ocean") to the first primates, Gonick moves on to early pre-history in volume two, "Sticks and Stones. Homo Erectus, Neanderthal and the more advanced Cro-Magnon human of the Stone Age give way to the Homo Sapiens of the first post-ice age settlements of 12,000 years ago. Volume two ends with the founding of cities in Sumer, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. Four billion years in 100 pages...