Grimaldi man
The remains are now recognized as representing two individuals, and are dated to possibly being of the same age as the five Cro-Magnon skeletons discovered by French palaeontologist Louis Lartet in 1868, and classified as part of the wider Early European modern humans population.
The remains from one of the caves, the "Barma Grande", have in recent time been radiocarbon dated to 25,000 years old, which places it in the Upper Paleolithic.
[4] The Grimaldi skeletons were found in the lower Aurignacian layer in June 1901, by the Canon de Villeneuve.
[7] The skeletons were in remarkably good shape, though the weight of some 8 metres (26 ft) of sediments had crushed the skulls somewhat, particularly the fine bones of the face.
[9] The dating techniques of the day were limited, but the Grimaldi people were believed to be of the late Palaeolithic period.
The more tropical fauna of the lower levels below the Grimaldi man skeletons had rhinoceros, hippopotamus and elephants, are known from the Mousterian Pluvial, a moist period from 50,000 to 30,000 years before present.
Unlike the robust Neanderthals, the Grimaldi skeletons were slender and gracile, even more so than the Cro-Magnon finds from the same cave system.
The faces had wide nasal openings and lacked the rectangular orbitae and broad complexion so characteristic of Cro-Magnons.
[12] These traits, combined with what de Villeneuve interpreted as prognathism led the discoverers to the conclusion that the Grimaldi man had been of a "negroid" type.
[4] By the 1970s, new finds from Jebel Qafzeh in Israel, Combe-Capelle in Southern France, Minatogawa in Japan, the Kabwe skull from Zambia and several Paleo-Indians had considerably broadened the knowledge of early human populations.
[18] The old term "Cro-Magnon" was replaced with "anatomically modern human" to encompass the expanding population out of Africa, including the Grimaldi remains.
[15] Cheikh Anta Diop (1981) insisted that the Grimaldi man represent a distinct "black race", different from the Cro-Magnon found in other parts of Europe and previously argued this classification in his 1974 work, "The African Origin of Civilizations" 1974.
[19][20] Diop had defended his use of the terminology as a set of criteria "established by anthropologists to characterise the Negro: black skin, facial prognathism, crinkly hair, flat nose (the facial and nasal indicators being very arbitrarily selected by different anthro-pologists) negritic bone structure (ratio between upper and lower limbs)".
