Cro-Magnon

Before the LGM, Cro-Magnons had overall low population density, tall stature similar to post-industrial humans, and expansive trade routes stretching as long as 900 km (560 mi), and hunted big game animals.

This peaked about 21,000 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) when Scandinavia, the Baltic region, and the British Isles were covered in glaciers, and winter sea ice reached the French seaboard.

Around 4,500 years ago, the immigration of the Yamnaya and Corded Ware cultures from the eastern steppes brought the Bronze Age, the Proto-Indo-European language, and more or less the present-day genetic makeup of Europeans.

[31] As assigned by the French Minister of Public Instruction Victor Duruy to verify the finds,[29] Louis Lartet made systematic excavation and discovered additional human remains, animal bones, stone tools, and ornaments.

[44]: 96  Among the earliest attempts to classify Cro-Magnons was done by racial anthropologists Joseph Deniker and William Z. Ripley in 1900, who characterised them as tall and intelligent proto-Aryans, superior to other races, who descended from Scandinavia and Germany.

[55] Aurignacians in particular featured a higher proportion of traits somewhat reminiscent of Neanderthals, such as (though not limited to) a slightly flattened skullcap and consequent occipital bun protruding from the back of the skull (the latter could be quite defined).

Their frequency significantly diminished in Gravettians, and in 2007, palaeoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus concluded these were remnants of Neanderthal introgression which were eventually bred out of the gene pool in his review of the relevant morphology.

The second wave (represented by Bacho Kiro ~45kya) appeared to be more closely related to modern East Asians and Australasians compared to Europeans, suggesting that this lineage split initially after the formation of Eastern Eurasians, and migrated instead northwestwards into Europe.

The LGM extirpated most European megafauna (Quaternary extinction event), and similarly post-LGM peoples tend to have a higher rate of nutrient-deficiency-related ailments, including a reduction in average height.

[82] Nonetheless, Magdalenian peoples appear to have had a greater dependence on small animals, aquatic resources, and plants than predecessors, probably due to the relative scarcity of European big game following the LGM (Quaternary extinction event).

[6] It is possible that human activity, in addition to the rapid retreat of favourable steppeland, inhibited recolonisation of most of Europe by megafauna following the LGM (such as mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, Irish elk, and cave lions), in part contributing to their extinction which occurred by the beginning of or well into the Holocene depending on the species.

[84] The Palaeolithic archaeobotanical record outside Europe (especially in the Middle East) shows these peoples were capable of processing a massive range of plant resources, in the 20,000 year old Israeli Ohalo II site as many as 150 types of seeds, fruits, nuts, and starches.

There are several European Mediterranean cave sites dating to near the end of the Palaeolithic which suggest the inhabitants were harvesting acorn, almond, pistacia, hawthorn, wild pear, blackthorn, rosehip, sorbus, and grape.

[81] As opposed to the patriarchy prominent in historical societies, the idea of a prehistoric predominance of either matriarchy or matrifocal families (centred on motherhood) was first supposed in 1861 by legal scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen.

[87] However, when the first Palaeolithic representations of humans were discovered, the so-called Venus figurines – which typically feature pronounced breasts, buttocks, and vulvas (areas generally sexualised in present-day Western Culture) – they were initially interpreted as pornographic in nature.

[88] The Palaeolithic matriarchy model was adapted by prominent communist Friedrich Engels, who instead argued that women were robbed of power by men due to economic changes which could only be undone with the adoption of communism (Marxist feminism).

The former sentiment was adopted by the first-wave feminism movement, who attacked the patriarchy by making Darwinist arguments of a supposed natural egalitarian or matrifocal state of human society instead of patriarchal, as well as interpreting the Venuses as evidence of mother goddess worship as part of some matriarchal religion.

The early Upper Palaeolithic is especially known for highly mobile lifestyles, with Gravettian groups (at least those analysed in Italy and Moravia, Ukraine) often sourcing some raw materials upwards of 200 km (120 mi).

[19] At the 30,000 year old Romanian Poiana Cireşului site, perforated shells of the Homalopoma sanguineum sea snail were recovered, which is significant as it inhabits the Mediterranean at nearest 900 km (560 mi) away.

[93] Based on the distribution of Mediterranean and Atlantic seashell jewellery even well inland, there may have been a network during the Late Glacial Interstadial (14 to 12 thousand years ago) along the rivers Rhine and Rhône in France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Based on such structuralist tests, horses and bovines seem to have been preferentially clustered together typically in a central position, and such binary organisation led to the suggestion that this was sexual symbolism, and some animals and iconography were designated by Cro-Magnons as either male or female.

They feature a downturned head, no face, thin arms which end at or cross over voluminous breasts, rotund buttocks, a distended abdomen (interpreted as pregnancy), tiny and bent legs, and pegged or unnaturally short feet.

[89] Another early hypothesis was that ideal womanhood for Cro-Magnons involved obesity, or that the Venuses were used by men as erotica due to the exaggeration of body parts typically sexualised in Western Culture (as well as the lack of detail to individualising traits such as the face and limbs).

[114] Also in 1972, Marshack identified 15 to 13 thousand year old Magdalenian plaques bearing small, abstract symbols seemingly into organised blocks or sets, which he interpreted as representing an early writing system.

It is also possible that ochre was chosen for its utility, such as an ingredient for adhesives, hide tanning agent, insect repellent, sunscreen, medicinal properties, dietary supplement, or as a soft hammer.

[120] The inhabitants of Dzudzuana Cave, Georgia, appear to have been staining flax fibres with plant-based dyes, including yellow, red, pink, blue, turquoise, violet, black, brown, gray, green, and khaki.

[112][120] Cro-Magnons are known to have created flutes out of hollow bird bones as well as mammoth ivory, first appearing in the archaeological record with the Aurignacian about 40,000 years ago in the German Swabian Jura.

[127] Several Upper Palaeolithic caves feature depictions of seemingly part-human, part-animal chimaeras (typically part bison, reindeer, or deer), variously termed "anthropozoomorphs", "therianthropes", or "sorcerers".

[129]: 208–209  The 17,000 year old Grotte de Lascaux, France, has a seemingly dead bird-human hybrid between a rhino and a charging bison, with a bird on top of a pole placed near the figure's right hand.

[141] Cro-Magnons are also portrayed interacting with Neanderthals, such as in J.-H. Rosny's 1911 Quest for Fire, H. G. Wells' 1927 The Grisly Folk, William Golding's 1955 The Inheritors, Björn Kurtén's 1978 Dance of the Tiger, Jean M. Auel's 1980 Clan of the Cave Bear and her Earth's Children series, and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' 1987 Reindeer Moon and its 1990 sequel The Animal Wife.