Cro-Magnons appeared about. The ancient Cro-Magnon man - a characteristic of the lifestyle, tools, interesting facts with photos and videos. How did the Cro-Magnon hunt? Way of life, tools of labor of an early representative of man
Cro-Magnons are considered to be the ancestors of modern man, who lived on our planet in the era of the late (or upper) Paleolithic (40-12 thousand years ago). The name of this type of primitive people comes from the Cro-Magnon cave, located in the southwestern part of France. It was there that in 1868 the archaeologist Louis Larte, during excavations, stumbled upon the remains of ancient people who, in their appearance, differed from the previously discovered Neanderthal skeletons and resembled Homo sapiens. The find, whose age was about 30 thousand years, immediately attracted the attention of scientists who studied the history of that period, because then nothing was known about the way of life of the Cro-Magnons. In subsequent years, their remains, along with tools, were also found in other territories (Mladech and Dolni-Vestonice in the Czech Republic, Payviland in England, Peshtera-cu-Oase in Romania, Murzak-Koba in the Crimea, Sungir in Russia, Mezhirech in Ukraine, Fish Hook, Cape Flats in Africa, etc.).
Emergence and migration
The origin of the Cro-Magnons has not been fully studied to this day. Previously, historians and anthropologists adhered to the Marxist theory of the emergence of this type of ancient man. According to her, the Cro-Magnon is a direct descendant of the Neanderthal. Many modern researchers question this theory. They are inclined to the version that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons descended from a common ancestor, after which each of them began to develop separately.
Modern scientists have not been able to reach a consensus about in which part of the planet the first ancestors of modern man appeared and when exactly it happened. The most common version says that the Cro-Magnons formed into a separate species about 200 thousand years ago, and this happened in eastern Africa. After 70 thousand years, they began migrating to the Middle East in search of new lands for life. From here, one part of the Cro-Magnons settled in Asia Minor and the coast of the Indian Ocean, while the other moved north and reached the lands of Asia Minor and the Northern Black Sea region. Homo sapiens appeared in Europe approximately 40-45 thousand years ago.
Appearance
What did the Cro-Magnons look like? Ancient man, fossil man, differed from modern individuals in the structure of the body and the size of the brain. In contrast, representatives of Homo sapiens resembled today's people, but were larger. Archaeological finds made it possible to find out that the Cro-Magnon men who inhabited ancient Europe reached a height of 180 cm (women were shorter), had wide faces and deep-set eyes. The volume of the brain of a reasonable person was 1400-1900 cubic centimeters, which corresponds to this indicator in modern people. The way of life of the Cro-Magnons, who had to survive in the harsh conditions of antiquity, contributed to the formation of their well-developed muscle mass.
Life
Ancient people lived in communities, the number of which reached 100 people. Their main occupations were hunting and gathering plant foods. They were the first to make tools from bones and horns. Along with this, the use of stone tools remained widespread among them. Lighter and more advanced products allowed them to get more food, sew clothes, invent devices aimed at facilitating their existence. Scientists are convinced that the ancient people of this era had a well-developed speech.
dwelling
The Cro-Magnons still continued to settle in the caves, but new types of housing had already begun to appear. They learned how to build reliable tents from animal skins, wood and bones. Such houses could be moved, thanks to which the lifestyle of the Cro-Magnons ceased to be sedentary. Wandering from place to place in order to develop new lands, they carried housing and households with them. Cro-Magnons were the first prehistoric people who managed to domesticate a dog and use it as an assistant.
The ancestors of mankind had a widespread cult of hunting. This is evidenced by numerous finds of animal figurines pierced by arrows found during excavations of their settlements. Ancient people decorated the walls of their dwellings with images of animals and scenes of hunting.
Food extraction
Hunting has firmly entered the life of the Cro-Magnon. The realities of the Stone Age were such that in order to feed themselves, it was necessary to kill. The ancient inhabitants of our planet hunted in well-organized groups of 10-20 people. The objects of their persecution were large animals (mammoths, wolves, woolly rhinos, bears, red deer, bison). Destroying the beast, they provided their communities with a large amount of skin and meat. The main tools for killing animals among the Cro-Magnons were spear throwers and bows. In addition to hunting, they were engaged in catching birds and fish (snares were used for the first lesson, and harpoons and hooks were used for the second).
In addition to meat and fish, the descendants of modern man ate wild plants. The food of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons was very similar. They ate everything that nature gave them (bark, leaves and fruits of trees, stems, flowers and roots of plants, cereals, mushrooms, nuts, algae, etc.).
Burials
The Cro-Magnons had interesting burial customs. They laid the deceased relatives in the grave in a half-bent position. Their hair was decorated with a net, their hands with bracelets, and their faces were covered with flat stones. The bodies of the dead were sprinkled with red ocher on top. Ancient people believed in the afterlife, so they buried their relatives along with household items, jewelry and food, being sure that they would need them after death.
Cro-Magnon Cultural Revolution
People who lived in the late Paleolithic period made a number of discoveries that allowed them to significantly surpass their predecessors in the cultural development. Their main achievement is the invention of a new method of processing flint, which went down in history under the name "knife plate method". This discovery made a real revolution in the manufacture of tools. The method consisted in the fact that separate plates were beaten off or squeezed out of the stone nodule (nucleus), from which various products were subsequently made. Thanks to the new technology, prehistoric people learned how to get up to 250 cm of working edge from one kilogram of flint (for Neanderthals, this figure did not exceed 220 cm, and for their predecessors it barely reached 45 cm).
An equally important discovery of the Cro-Magnons was the production of tools from animal raw materials. Spending a lot of time hunting, the ancient man noticed that the bones, horns and tusks of animals are distinguished by increased strength. He began to make qualitatively new products from them, which made his life easier. Bone needles and awls appeared, making it easier to sew clothes from skins. Animal raw materials began to be used in the construction of new dwellings, as well as to make jewelry and figurines from it. The development of new materials led to the invention of more advanced hunting tools - spear throwers and bows. These devices allowed the Cro-Magnons to kill animals that were many times their size and strength.
The lifestyle of the Cro-Magnons was not only about survival among the wild. Prehistoric people strove for beauty. They left many works of art to their descendants. These are wall paintings in caves, and tools decorated with unique ornaments, and figurines of bison, horses, deer and other animals made of flint, clay, bones and tusks. The ancient Cro-Magnons worshiped female beauty. Among the finds discovered by archaeologists, there are many figurines of the fair sex. For the splendor of forms, modern historians called them "Venuses".
Cro-Magnons is the common name of the ancient representatives of modern man, who appeared much later than the Neanderthals and coexisted with them for some time (40-30,000 years ago). Their appearance and physical development were in fact no different from modern humans.
Approximately 40–30,000 years ago, the third greatest event in the life of our planet took place. The first, which happened several billion years ago, was the origin of life. The second is the beginning of humanization, the transition from ape to ape-man - about 2 million years ago. The third event is the emergence of a modern type of man, Homo sapiens - a reasonable man.
40-30,000 years ago, it appears and very quickly (quickly in this case, when a millennium is a trifle) takes the place of the Neanderthals.
Cro-Magnon skeletons found
As soon as an archaeologist from France Larte discovered 5 skeletons in the Cro-Magnon grotto under a thick layer of centuries-old deposits, he immediately guessed that he had met “acquaintances”. Shortly before this, the scientist became aware that, by order of the authorities of the Haute-Garonne department, 17 skeletons, accidentally found in the Orignac Pyrenean cave, were buried in the parish cemetery. Larte was able to prove without difficulty that the strict rules of Christian burial could be waived in relation to these people, and not only dug them back, but also established (using stone tools and animal bones from the Aurignac cave) that these were contemporaries of the same ice age, where the classic Neanderthals lived. The tools of the Aurignacian man are in a slightly higher, i.e. late, layer than the tools of the Chapelles.
The two caves in which the most ancient people of the modern type were found gave them their names: the first person was called the Cro-Magnon, and the first great period of his history was the Aurignac period (culture).
Soon followed by dozens of discoveries of Cro-Magnon skeletons and sites throughout Western Europe and North Africa, and the ancient "reasonable man" appeared in all its splendor and splendor.
Parking lot Sungir
Sculptural portraits of a girl and a boy from the Sungir site
Sungir is an Upper Paleolithic Cro-Magnon site on the territory of the Vladimir region. There is a well-known paired burial of a boy aged 12–14 and a girl aged 9–10, lying with their heads to each other. What their bones could tell. As it turned out, the boy, despite his age, could throw a spear well with his right hand. The girl, judging by the development of her fingers and forearm, often made scrolling movements with her right hand. We know that the clothes of the Sungir people were covered with many beads made of mammoth bone, and there were holes in the beads. These holes, apparently, were drilled by a young Cro-Magnon woman.
The structure of the right humerus and cervical vertebrae show that the girl often raised her right arm up, and her head was constantly tilted to the left. In order for such features to appear on the skeleton already in childhood, the load must be very strong! According to anthropologists, the girl regularly wore weights on her head, and held them with her right hand. Perhaps during the transitions from camp to camp, which were made by nomadic groups of Cro-Magnons, the little Cro-Magnon was a carrier on a par with adults.
What was a Cro-Magnon
Cro-Magnons evoked admiration from their discoverers, mixed with envy: the first people - and immediately what!
They were Caucasians, of enormous height (on average 187 cm), with an ideal straight bipedal gait and a very large head (from 1600 to 1900 cm³). Such a large skull could still be considered a "relic of Neanderthalism", but this head already had a straight forehead, a high cranial vault, and a sharply protruding chin.
Cro-Magnon man did not know what metal was, did not suspect either agriculture or cattle breeding, but if we could transfer him through 400 centuries, he, apparently, would easily understand everything and could draw up an equation, write a poem, work on the machine and compete in a chess tournament.
Where did the Cro-Magnon come from?
A Cro-Magnon man appeared - for archaeologists and anthropologists - somehow at once: just here, in the caves of France and Italy, squat, powerful, invincible people lived, and suddenly they quickly, abruptly disappear, and people of the modern type are already hunting in their area. The newcomers are accompanied by an incredible technological revolution: instead of 3-4 primitive Neanderthal stone tools, about 20 stone and bone “devices” are used during the Aurignac period: awls, needles, tips, and so on. Immediately, as if from nothing, an amazing cave art appears.
This most powerful anthropological, technical and cultural upheaval now determines the entire human history. For billions of years, animals have existed only according to biological laws, improving, expanding the apparatus of adaptation, but not leaving the biological framework. But now a most important event occurs: the development of a group of animals has reached such a stage that they include in the mechanism of their adaptation, in addition to their own teeth and paws, also an inanimate object that does not belong to the body: a stick, a stone.
According to one version, the Cro-Magnon is the ancestor of all modern people, having appeared in East Africa approximately 130-180,000 years ago. According to this theory, 50-60,000 years ago they migrated from Africa to the Arabian Peninsula and appeared in Eurasia. The first group was able to quickly populate the coast of the Indian Ocean, and the second migrated to the steppes of Central Asia. The second group is the ancestors of nomadic peoples and most of the Middle Eastern and North African population. Migration from the Black Sea to Europe began approximately 40-50,000 years ago, presumably through the Danube corridor. 20,000 years ago, all of Europe was already inhabited.
How has everything changed?
Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon
From now on, this creature no longer belongs entirely to biology, there is a gap in the “biological fence”. Oldowan pebbles, an axe, a stone axe, a locomotive, an electronic computing device - these are phenomena of the same order: a living being uses and combines inanimate objects. "Who" dominates "what".
The breakthrough of biology that occurs in a social animal multiplies, intensifies in the pack, creates new relationships in this pack. But, apparently, the biological factor, that is, the physical structure of the creature, does not immediately get used to, is consistent with the new "organs" - tools: for about 2 million years, the first ape-men change not only their inventory, but also their physical structure. A hand squeezing a broken pebble makes the brain think hard and increase, but not remaining in debt, the brain sends its signals to the hand: it also improves.
Over thousands of centuries, tools go from rough stone, stick or bone to the Neanderthal axe, stone scraper and pointed point.
The brain during this period increases from 600–700 to 1500 cm³.
Gait - from semi-monkey to completely straight.
Hand - from a tenacious paw to a perfect tool.
The collective - from the animal flock to the first human social forms.
Some law of evolution, which we have not yet fully deciphered, causes the body of the ape-man to change along with his tools.
Comparison with modern man
Eventually there comes a point when biology and tools reach full agreement, a point from which brain and hand can do whatever work they want. The same brain and the same hand as a Cro-Magnon man will control a bow 20,000 years later, a plow 25,000 years later, and a few thousand years later - a locomotive, a car, an airplane, a rocket.
To move from a primitive ax to a more perfect one, it took from a Pithecanthropus to become a Neanderthal. And in order to come from stone unpolished tips to the splitting of the atom, “nothing” was needed, that is, it seems that nothing fundamentally changed in the human body.
Instead of changing physically in the struggle for existence, man chose a different path. From now on, he began to improve "inanimate objects" and changed the structure of his society. Physical changes were replaced by faster and more painless - technical, social.
And how can we actually know that the biological development of man has stopped?
Discussions on this topic have been going on for a very long time. It has been noticed that there are secular, millennial fluctuations in the physical structure of a person: the Cro-Magnon man was taller than us, now, as you know, humanity is again growing quite rapidly. Several thousand years ago, human bones were more massive, then they became more elegant, tomorrow, perhaps, they will again become massive and bulky. Undoubtedly, "brachycephalization" is going on, an increase in the number of short-headed people compared to long-headed ones.
The reasons for these changes are cryptic: food, a new way of life? The seriousness of these changes is also predictable: are these phenomena temporary, or tomorrow they will be covered by another change, or will a person still look different in a few tens or hundreds of millennia, not like now?
Guessing about the future, however, we have the right to declare: over the past 30-40 thousand years, gigantic changes in technology have occurred, but during the same time there have been no fundamental "corporeal" changes.
Obviously, the “thousand-great-grandfathers” laid a good foundation!
Cro-Magnon culture
The Cro-Magnon created a rich and varied Late Paleolithic culture. There are descriptions of more than 100 types of complex stone and bone tools made with great skill, made by new, more efficient processing of stone and bone. To a large extent, the Cro-Magnons also improved hunting methods (driven hunting), hunting deer, mammoths, woolly rhinos, cave bears, wolves and other animals. They began to manufacture spear throwers (a spear could fly 137 m), as well as devices for catching fish (harpoons, hooks), and bird snares.
Cro-Magnons usually lived in caves, but at the same time, they built various dwellings from stone and dugouts, tents from animal skins, and even entire villages. Early neoanthropes could make sewn clothes, often decorated. So, at the Sungir site (Vladimir region), more than 1000 beads were found on the fur clothes of a man, many other decorations were found - bracelets, rings.
The Cro-Magnon man was the creator of remarkable European primitive art, as evidenced by the multi-color painting on the walls and ceilings of caves ((Spain), Montespan, Lascaux (France), etc.), engravings on pieces of stone or bone, ornament, small stone and clay sculpture. Amazing images of horses, deer, bison, mammoths, female figurines, called by archaeologists “Venuses” for their splendor of forms, various objects carved from bone, horns and tusks or molded from clay, can no doubt testify to a highly developed sense of beauty among Cro-Magnons. Cave art reached its peak approximately 19-15,000 years ago. Scientists believe that the Cro-Magnons could have had magical rites and rituals.
Probably, the life expectancy of Cro-Magnons was longer than that of Neanderthals: about 10% already lived to be 40 years old. In this era, the primitive communal system was also formed.
Cro-Magnon cave with wall paintings
In the south-west of France, near the city of Villonaire, Charente department, speleologists and archaeologists have discovered a cave with ancient wall paintings.
Cave researchers managed to find a unique and extremely valuable underground hall with rock art back in December 2005, but the unique cave was reported much later. Recently, scientists have increasingly adhered to such strong secrecy with valuable finds in order to prevent their destruction by unwanted visitors.
Work is underway to date the rock paintings. Experts do not exclude that they may be older than those in the famous Lasko Cave and Altamira Cave. According to the first impressions of experts, we are talking about a Cro-Magnon site, that is, a period of 30,000 years ago. According to scientists, the discovery in Villonera could be a revolution in science - it used to be believed that in such ancient times people did not resort to painting the walls of their underground dwellings.
Cro-Magnons - this is the common name of the ancestors of people who lived on the planet during the Pleistocene 40-10 thousand years ago. The Cro-Magnons made a sharp leap in the development of the evolution of mankind. This leap was decisive not only for the survival of the human race, but also in the development of Homo sapiens of Homo sapiens.
The emergence of the Cro-Magnons
Cro-Magnon appeared much later than Neanderthals, about 40,000 years ago. But some anthropologists believe that the very first Cro-Magnons appeared more than 100,000 years ago. Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons are varieties of the same genus Homo. Scientists suggest that the Neanderthals descended from the Heidelberg man, which is considered a species (Homo erectus) of Homo erectus and were not the ancestors of modern people. Cro-Magnons are descended from Homo erectus and are considered the direct ancestors of modern humans.
Discovery of the remains
In France, in the rocky grotto of Cro-Magnon, several skeletons of ancient people with tools from the Late Paleolithic were found. Thanks to the place of discovery, this new species of ancient people was called "Cro-Magnon".
Later, the remains of Cro-Magnons were found in the Czech Republic, Russia, Serbia and Great Britain.
Scientists put forward different versions of the appearance and distribution of Cro-Magnons - our ancestors. One version says that the first Cro-Magnons appeared 130,000 years ago in East Africa. And about 50,000 years ago they migrated to Eurasia and Africa. Initially, one group was able to populate the coast of the Indian Ocean, and the second group populated the steppes of Central Asia. Approximately 20,000 years ago, the Cro-Magnons came to Europe. There are other versions about the resettlement of the Cro-Magnons.
Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals
The Cro-Magnon had significant advantages over the European Neanderthal. Although the Neanderthals were adapted to the cold climate, they could not resist the Cro-Magnons. The Cro-Magnons brought such a high culture that the Neanderthals immediately gave way to them in development, although the Neanderthals already knew how to create tools and learned how to use fire, and also had the rudiments of speech. By that time, the Cro-Magnons had already learned how to make complex decorations from bones, horns and stones, and they also painted beautifully on the walls of rocks. The Cro-Magnons were the first to create full-fledged human settlements, lived in tribal communities, which consisted of up to 100 people. The dwellings of the Cro-Magnons were diverse, they settled in caves, created tents from animal skins, built dugouts, as well as houses from stone boulders. The Cro-Magnons created more perfect clothes from skins and were the first to tame the dog.
As anthropologists suggest, the Cro-Magnons came to Europe and met Neanderthals there, who had already mastered the best territories and settled in comfortable caves. Probably, the Cro-Magnons began the fight against the Neanderthals and gradually forced them out. Archaeologists have found bones of Neanderthals at Cro-Magnon sites, which had traces of jaws, it turns out that Neanderthals were not only exterminated, but also eaten. There is another version that says that the Neanderthals were assimilated with the Cro-Magnons.
Some finds at the site of the Cro-Magnons indicate that these ancient people had the beginnings of religion. Cult rites among Cro-Magnons can be traced too clearly. Our ancestors 20,000 years ago performed complex funeral rites and buried their relatives in the fetal position, they believed that in this way the soul could be reborn. The dead were decorated with ornaments, and household items and food were placed in the grave, they believed that the soul would need food and household items in the afterlife.
One of the groups of fossil neoanthropes. Name comes from the grotto Cromagnon (Cromagnon) in the dep. Dordogne (France), where in 1868 it was discovered several. skeletons of people of this type. The bone remains of K. are known (since 1823) from the late Pleistocene of Europe. ... ... Biological encyclopedic dictionary
Modern Encyclopedia
- (from the name of the grotto Cro Magnon Cro Magnon, in France), the generalized name of the fossil people of the modern species (neoanthropes) of the Late Paleolithic. Known from bone remains discovered in all parts of the world. Appeared ok. 40 thousand years ago… Big Encyclopedic Dictionary
Cro-Magnons- (Cro Magnons), prehistoric. people of modern species (Homo sapiens) that inhabited Europe ca. 35 10 thousand years ago. K. had a more massive physique than modern. man, but otherwise the same anatomical. x ki. Appeared in Europe approx. 35 thousand years ago, and ... ... The World History
Cro-Magnons- (from the name of the grotto Cro Magnon, Cro Magnon, in France), the most common of the fossil people of the modern species (neoanthropes) of the late Paleolithic era. Known from skeletal remains mainly from Europe. Appeared about 40 thousand years ... ... Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary
Tsev; pl. (sing. Cro-Magnon, nza; m.). The general name of the people of the Late Paleolithic ● The name comes from the grotto of Cro-Magnon in France, where in 1868 the bones of the Cro-Magnon skeleton were found. ◁ Cro-Magnon, oh, oh. K th era, cave. * *… … encyclopedic Dictionary
A generalized name for people of the late Paleolithic era. The name comes from the Cro Magnon grotto in the Dordogne department (France), where in 1868 the French archaeologist and paleontologist L. Larte discovered K. S ... ... Great Soviet Encyclopedia
Cro-Magnons- the term is ambiguous: 1) in the narrow sense, Cro-Magnons are people found in the Cro-Magnon grotto (France) and lived about 30 thousand years ago; 2) in a broader sense, this is the entire population of Europe during the Upper Paleolithic from 40 to 10 thousand years ago; 3)… … Physical Anthropology. Illustrated explanatory dictionary.
- (by the name of the Cro Magnon cave in France, where the first fossils were found) people of the modern type that existed in Europe in the Upper Pleistocene and differed sharply from the Neanderthals. A new dictionary of foreign words ... Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language
The general name of the people of the Late Paleolithic era. Name comes from the grotto Cro Magnon (Cro Magnon) in dep. Dordogne (France), where in 1868 the first finds of K. S. Anthropological were made. point of view K. belong to the modern. kind of person (Homo… … Soviet historical encyclopedia
Books
- New Cro-Magnons. Memories of the future. Book 1, Yuri Berkov. If you want to have not only pleasant, but also useful reading, if you want to expand your horizons, read this book. You will plunge into the mysterious world of the future and live a stormy… electronic book
- New Cro-Magnons. Memories of the future. Book 2, Yuri Berkov. If you have mastered the first book, then you will read the second with even greater interest. In it, you will find amazing life collisions of its heroes, exciting underwater adventures and a lot of…
It is no coincidence that everyone unanimously also calls the Cro-Magnon man "modern man." (Meaning, of course, the modern Caucasoid.) The name "Cro-Magnon" is arbitrary: it comes from the place Cro-Magnon in France, where the first such skeleton was found. There is no biological reason not to call a Cro-Magnon an early Caucasoid - or you and me, a late Cro-Magnon. If the question of the direct origin of Negroes from Neanderthals is not yet very confident (more confidently - about the origin of Australoids from them; we are personally sure of both), then there is no doubt. Every representative of European peoples and even some other (later) peoples can say: Cro-Magnon is my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
This was understood already at the dawn of anthropology. The prominent German anthropologist Alexander Ecker (1818-1887) in the 60s of the 19th century discovered skulls of the "northern type" in the graves of southern Germany and established their identity with the skulls of modern Germans. Skulls of a pure "northern type" throughout Scandinavia and Northern Germany were also discovered by the greatest Swedish anthropologist Anders Retzius (1796-1860). It was on the basis of these numerous craniological series that it was suggested that the modern "northern type" in its structure goes back to the Cro-Magnon type of Paleolithic Europe. The classic of the French anthropological school, Armand de Quatrefage (1810-1892), even called the ancient Cro-Magnon a blond in the modern sense of the word. Ideally upright, very tall (average height 187 cm) and large-headed (brain size from 1600 to 1900 cm?), They, like us, had a straight forehead, a high cranial vault, and a sharply protruding chin. Over time, having discovered the fingerprints of ancient sculptors on clay figurines of the Paleolithic era, scientists have established their complete racial identity with the modern Caucasoid.
The data of craniology is a most serious argument, as much has already been said above. Therefore, the data of science on the distribution of the Cro-Magnon skull around the globe deserve not only trust, but also special attention and thought.
As Eugen Fischer wrote in his work “Race and the Origin of Races in Man” (1927): “One of the most reasonable hypotheses is as follows: the Nordic race originated from the Cro-Magnon race, the builders of megaliths, dolmen burials in Scandinavia, Denmark, etc. According to the named hypothesis , the Nordic race arose as a result of the modification of the Late Paleolithic race in the North as the places inhabited today were freed from ice. Here the Nordic race arose, at the same time it acquired its typical qualities. This is the best explanation for the origin of the Nordic race." Let us leave in this passage the question of the place of the ethnogenesis of the Cro-Magnon for further discussion (as it is still beyond the competence of anthropologists) and accept the main thing: the Caucasoids settled the North precisely as modifications of the Cro-Magnon.
Were they already then divided into racial subtypes? Did the subtypes already begin to separate themselves by language? There is no doubt that sooner or later this happened. This is quite reasonably stated by the teachings of Darwin: the consequence of natural selection is the divergence of signs. This means that one parent species can give rise to several new species. This is what the waves of migrations from North to South, which were carried out by the Cro-Magnons periodically throughout the entire observable historical and prehistoric retrospective, also speak of. Figuratively speaking, the Cro-Magnons until the 20th century of our era “quanta” were sprayed to the South, East and West from their northern ecological niche as it was overflowing.
But they did not call themselves Cro-Magnons, of course. What were the names of the expansive "quanta"? They are called by different sources in different ways, and we will omit the names of many forgotten ones today. In the Middle Ages, New and Modern times, for example, these were Germans, Spaniards, English, French, Dutch, Belgians, Russians. In more distant times - Franks, Vikings, Goths, Normans, Lombards. Before them - Germans, Celts, Huns, Scythians, Slavs. Before them - the Etruscans, Proto-Hellenes, Proto-Italics. Before them, the Indo-Aryans, before them - the Proto-Iranians, before them - the Hittites ... All of them spoke the languages of the Indo-European group, but during the time that had elapsed from "quantum" to "quantum", they managed to change to the point of complete impossibility of mutual understanding.
Always “from top to bottom”, always from North to South, one after another, waves of mass migrations (“invasions”), represented by new descendants of the Cro-Magnon, rolled one after another. At the same time, the late wave often rolled over the early one; a fratricidal war broke out, all the more terrible because the warring parties no longer saw brothers in each other, because time and miscegenation with oncoming races and peoples sometimes changed their appearance and language beyond recognition. The brother did not recognize and did not understand the brother. One "quant" spoke Hittite, another - Sanskrit, a third in Zendi and Avestan, a fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh - in Greek, Latin, Finnish, Slavonic ... Language barriers have already become rigid, and racial subtypes are the result of miscegenation - already formed: how was it to restore kinship? In those days, after all, it never occurred to anyone to measure skulls in order to solve this problem!
The skulls were measured in modern times - and gasped: the descendants of the Cro-Magnon, it turns out (judging by the proto-Nordic skulls in the burials), reached Central Africa, India, Oceania and Polynesia, not to mention Siberia, the Urals, Altai, Kazakhstan, China, Central Asia, Pamirs and the entire Mediterranean, including North Africa and Asia Minor. Etc.
Today, these descendants have a variety of names, speak different languages, do not understand each other and are not considered kinship. But they all came from the Great North Platform, all have a common ancestor - the Cro-Magnon.
WHERE DID THE NEANDERTHALS GO
AS EVERYONE knows, Neanderthals once inhabited all of Europe, except for Scandinavia and northern Russia: their remains are found in England, Germany, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, southern Russia (in Scythian mounds), etc. These are autochthons, old-timers of Europe. They were found in Central and Southeast Asia, and in Southern Siberia, in China, in the Crimea, in Palestine, in Africa (up to distant Rhodesia) and on the island of Java. For the time being, we will not touch on the question of how they got there or where they came from. Different experts date the age of the Neanderthal differently: according to some data, he is 50-100 thousand years old, according to others, less reliable, as much as 200, 250 and even 300 thousand years. For now, it is enough for us to take into account the thesis: “Anthropologists state the presence in the mentioned period of anthropogenesis in Europe of three variants of fossil people: 1) Neanderthals; 2) people of the modern type; 3) intermediate forms”, specifying that by modern man we mean Cro-Magnon, and by intermediate forms - a hybrid of the first two, and by no means a “transitional link”.
The first Neanderthal was found near Düsseldorf in 1856. In 1997, researchers from the University of Munich analyzed the DNA of the remains of this very first Neanderthal. The age of the find was determined at 50 thousand years. A study of 328 identified nucleotide chains led paleontologist S. Paabo to the conclusion that the differences in genes between Neanderthals and modern humans are too great to consider them relatives. This idea was confirmed by the studies of M. Ponce de Leon and K. Zollikofer (University of Zurich), who compared the skulls of a two-year-old Neanderthal and a small Cro-Magnon corresponding in age. The conclusion was unequivocal: these skulls were formed in completely different ways.
In the appearance of the Neanderthals there were features very different from the Cro-Magnons, but even today characteristic of the Negroid and Australoid race: a chin pushed back, large brow ridges, and very massive jaws. The Neanderthal had a larger brain than the Cro-Magnon, but a different configuration. The imperfection and small size of the frontal lobes of the brain was brightened up by the presence of convolutions, indicating a certain development of mental abilities. In the interspecies struggle, such a brain did not become an advantage over the Cro-Magnon one, but there is hardly any reason to oppose the Neanderthals to the Homo sapiens species as a whole, since they undoubtedly had a mind. And the structure of their palate, lower jaw, lower left frontal lobe of the brain (the speech zone of modern man) is such that it allowed Neanderthals to speak, although not too rich phonetically, due to the lack of a chin protrusion. The average height of men was 1.65 m, women were 10 cm shorter. At the same time, men weighed about 90 kg due to very strongly developed muscles and heavy, strong bones.
The whole corpses of Neanderthals (like the corpses of mammoths) have not been preserved, since they were not found in the soils of permafrost. There are only skeletons. Therefore, we cannot judge the color of their skin today for sure. In popular pictures and school manuals, Neanderthals are usually depicted as white-skinned upright creatures covered with sparse hair. But this coloring is not based on anything. A number of scientists today put forward the much more plausible hypothesis that Neanderthals were black. This is evidenced by both the geographical localization of the Neanderthals closest to us in time, who lived mainly in Central and South Africa and Java, and the color of those modern races that are reasonably considered descendants of the Neanderthal: Negroids, Australoids, Dravidians, etc. Enough " repaint "a Neanderthal from a school table in black - and we will face a creature with all persuasiveness that is extremely similar in appearance to the named races. Not only the skin and appearance, but also much more, for example, the structure of the tibia and ankle bones (whose articular planes indicate the habit of squatting for a long time, which is not characteristic of Caucasians) makes Neanderthals related to modern inhabitants of the South of the Earth. It is very characteristic that among the remains of the Cro-Magnons found in the grottoes of Grimaldi (Italy), the so-called "Grimaldians", there are two skeletons, characterized by some scientists as Negroid, by others as Neanderthal.
Neanderthals, like Cro-Magnons, were human, they were radically different from the animal world. Although people are biologically completely different, much inferior to the Cro-Magnon man. But still, the Neanderthals created their own culture, called the Mousterian (Chelian and Acheulian): stone and bone axes, scrapers, pointed points, although not in such a wide range as the Cro-Magnons, who created two dozen stone and bone "instruments". Neanderthals also knew fire, already 40 thousand years ago they honorably buried their dead according to a primitive rite, honored the afterlife, practiced hunting magic. At the same time, primitive ornaments appeared: pendants made from animal teeth. Scientists believe, however, that they could adopt the custom of decorating themselves from the Cro-Magnons. In any case, this is no longer characteristic of anyone in the animal kingdom. But the Neanderthals, unlike the Cro-Magnons, did not leave works of art (rock paintings, sculptures made of bone and baked clay).
The relationship between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons was not idyllic. At the sites of Neanderthals, carefully crushed and gnawed bones are found not only of large game, but also bones of Cro-Magnons, that is, the ancestors of modern people, that have been processed in the same way. And vice versa: crushed bones of Neanderthals were found at Cro-Magnon sites. The two protoras waged an irreconcilable war among themselves, a war of annihilation, "to be devoured," as the Bible would put it. What kind of war was accompanied, as fossil skeletons irrefutably testify, by racial mixing, most likely violent.
For about ten thousand years, a fierce confrontation between two protoras on the same territory lasted; but by the end of this period (about 40,000 years ago), the Cro-Magnons drove the Neanderthals out of Europe almost completely. Thirty thousand years ago, their remnants still survived in the Gibraltar region, in the Pyrenees and the mountains of Dalmatia. But in general, the “race of the vanquished” rolled back further south, to Western Asia and the Mediterranean, where the confrontation continued for many more millennia.
As has already been quite reliably established, Cro-Magnons did not and could not have descended from Neanderthals. But they could mix with them (we emphasize and confirm this once again) by “improving the breed”. Moreover, both on their own initiative and in addition to it, depending on the outcome of a particular interracial skirmish. If the men who were captured were threatened with the fate of being eaten, the fate of women could be completely different. The study of the Tasmanians, "stuck" in the Stone Age until their disappearance in the 19th century, showed that the intertribal relations of the Paleolithic people, in addition to diplomacy, trade and war, certainly include the abduction of women. The breed of Neanderthals unambiguously improved during miscegenation, the Cro-Magnon breed just as unequivocally worsened, but one way or another, the process was so intense, prolonged and mutual in nature that it led, as already mentioned, to the formation of new ethnic groups and even races of the second order.
A prominent Russian scientist Yu. D. Benevolenskaya in her article “The problem of identifying sapiens and Neanderthals in the early stages of evolution” (Courier of the Petrovsky Kunstkamera. Issue 8-9, St. Petersburg, 1999) writes: “The hypothesis of the evolutionary transformation of Neanderthals into neoanthropes more and more gives way to the idea of the displacement of the first by a modern type of man, which was accompanied by miscegenation between them.
Another outstanding domestic anthropologist A. A. Zubov in the article “Problems of intraspecific taxonomy of the genus homo in connection with modern ideas about the biological differentiation of mankind (Modern anthropology and genetics and the problem of races in humans. M., 1995) also indicates: “We can talk about "network" nature of the evolution of the genus homo at all stages of its evolution. It is important to note that the “network” could include different evolutionary “floors” that interacted with each other and made their genetic contribution to the common, unified fund of the diversity of the evolving homo genus.”
In other words, representatives of the "higher" human floors had sexual intercourse with representatives of the "lower", Neanderthal floors, as a result of which they gave birth to mestizos, then numerically isolated to the level of entire peoples and races, which gave rise to the general evolutionary diversity of the genus homo.
The famous American biologist Anthony Barnett in his book “The Human Race” (M., 1968) also testifies that “humans of the modern type appeared at about the same time, if not earlier, than the Neanderthal man, and developed in parallel. Intermediate types between modern humans and Neanderthals could be the result of either interbreeding or early phases of Neanderthal divergence from the lineage that led to modern man."
In all likelihood, the zone of miscegenation should be considered all territories, including Europe, where at one time or another both protoras lived simultaneously - Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. Hybrid forms then continued to exist everywhere and give offspring, interbreeding more and more with the dominant type - in Europe, the Cro-Magnon became such 40 thousand years ago. At the same time, according to Darwin's theory, the signs of mixed forms, as not provided for by natural selection (nature), in each generation were increasingly replaced by the dominant signs of the Caucasoid, being perceived over time as an atavism. As a result, Neanderthal features among white Caucasians, although they are found to this day, are only occasionally. The closer to the south, the more often they are, and in the zone of Western Asia and the Mediterranean they either become dominant or appear in the form of hybrid ethnic groups, which can be considered, for example, Semites, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Maghrebians, etc. Metisation is whimsically selective: if Ethiopians have black skin and Caucasoid facial features, while Semites, on the contrary, often have Negroid (Neanderthaloid) facial features with white or olive ("mulatto") skin, etc.
There is nothing surprising in the fact that entire hybrid peoples arose in the named zone, because it was here that the final of the Great Neanderthal War was played out for at least ten thousand years, and two protoras, locked between the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlas Mountains, continued to sort things out until then. , until they completely dissolved in each other and broke up into fancifully combined, but, moreover, quite homogeneous secondary races and ethnic groups. (At the same time, the dominant type disappeared as such, and the possibility of returning to it - reversion - became generally excluded, although periodically both original types necessarily appear, but only singly and fragmentarily.)
This, in particular, is narrated by the finds of archaeologists D. Garrod and T. McKone, made at the beginning of the 20th century in Palestine on Mount Carmel in the caves of Goat (Skhul) and Pechnaya (Tabun). The remains of ancient people were found there, separated in time by about ten thousand years: the ancient ash in the Furnace Cave is 40 thousand years old, and in the Goat Cave - 30 thousand years. During these ten thousand years, the population that inhabited this area underwent tremendous changes: a purely Neanderthal appearance gradually accumulated an increasing number of characteristic Cro-Magnon features. The inhabitants of the Skhul cave closest to us in time have the greatest number of Cro-Magnon characters (including an average height of 175 cm), while remaining, moreover, a hybrid.
Later, the conclusions made during the study of the Skhul and Tabun caves were fully confirmed by new finds in the same geographical area and in the same time layers of the soil. Namely, in the 1930s. on Mount Kafeh near Nazareth, the remains of six Neanderthals with such characteristic Cro-Magnon differences as a high vault of the skull, a rounded back of the head, etc. were found. , Shanidar (Iraq). In 1963, a Japanese expedition found in Israel the skeleton of a whole Neanderthal, but ... as tall as a Cro-Magnon man (170 cm). Etc.
As we already know for sure, the Cro-Magnon man did not descend from the Neanderthal. He fought him to the death, completely cleared Europe of him (partially mixing with the enemy, but then squeezing out his residual features drop by drop for tens of thousands of years), but he failed to repeat this feat in Western Asia and the Mediterranean. Here, it was in this region that the first "melting pot" in history arose, in which both the "south-fast" Cro-Magnon echelons and the Neanderthals who fled from them, but failed to escape, found their death and new life.
Does this mean that today only hybrid, intermediate or secondary forms remain from the ancient Neanderthals, that they all completely dissolved in a stronger race of winners or simply died out, giving way to other races?
No, there is no reason for such pessimism.
The Atlas Mountains stopped the weary pursuers, who found in the blessed climate of the Mediterranean their cherished ideal, bequeathed by genes and tribal traditions: they had nowhere and no reason to strive further. But the persecuted, saving their lives, filtered through the mountain barrier and gradually populated all of Africa and not only it. As a result, each protoras entrenched itself in its range: the Cro-Magnons, who became Caucasians, at home, mainly in Europe; Neanderthals, who became Negroids and Australoids, - in their country, mainly in Africa, then in southern India (where they were forced out in the 2nd millennium BC by the descendants of the Cro-Magnons, the so-called "Andronovites" - the future "Indo-Aryans"), in Australia, Tasmania etc.; and the world's first mixed race - at home, in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean. This happened about 30 thousand years ago.