About book Cro-Magnon: How The Ice Age Gave Birth To The First Modern Humans (2010)
Enjoyable book of "popular science" about the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon. The Neanderthal are covered as earlier residents of Europe into which the Cro-Magnon (modern man--homo sapiens) moved and, arguably, as a point of contrast. The Neanderthal pretty much get the short end of the stick in Fagan's reconstruction of prehistoric Europe--not simply in dying out but also in being judged by Fagan as being less human, as it were, not as smart as Cro-Magnon, not as adaptable, etc. I'm curious as to whether this is the common scientific view, especially as it reflects in such contentions as that the Neanderthal probably didn't speak/verbalize as well as C-M and we moderns, etc. Of course much of the book is conjectural as neither people were literate. Cro-Magnon life is an archaeological reconstruction and an extrapolation from the lives of modern (or recent) Arctic hunters as well as the lives of other tribal cultures. Fagan's reconstruction is probably as solid as anyone's can be, given the limitations of the evidence. The possible ramifications of C-M spiritual life, as indicated by the marvelous cave paintings in Spain and France especially, as well as by smaller artifacts and burials is interesting too. If you're interested in the lives of prehistoric man, this is a worthwhile investigation and summation. This is an embarrassingly bad book. The last sentence of the book sums up the whole sorry mess: "My [white European] DNA tells me I'm one of them, and I'm proud of it." The book is laden with the author's romantic adolescent male fantasies about what it was like being a cro-magnon man-- emphasis on "man." His typical fantasy involves a young man shooting birds with arrows while his "sister" (Fagan's choice of word) retrieves them. Another: "The man paddling in the bow, his wife in the stern..." My favorite is his assertion that all the women remained in the camp while the men are off hunting, a place redolent of the smell of urine, used to tan hides (which he believes the women spent all day crouched on their haunches, bent over pelts, tirelessly toiling the livelong day to keep the family in shoes & furs). Basically, he assumes a 1950s sit-com set of family & gender relations prevailed during the Paleolithic. (I kept thinking his imagination didn't rise much above the Flinstones.) All the wise elders are, of course, men, handing down their accumulated knowledge & wisdom to the boys. Apart from that, the author is unable to talk about technology without using modern anachronisms-- his favorite being the "swiss army knife" the men all possessed for undertaking their sophisticated feats of hunting. Seriously, give this one a miss if you're really interested in the Paleolithic.
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Great walk through the history of the development of Cro-Magnon man.
—edhcall
One species emerges over another at the end of the Ice Age.
—Kilt54327
Thank you for this very readable book Brian Fagan.
—Nesian1
