Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans

Brian Fagan

jun 2010 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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A Los Angeles Times Bestseller

New York Times best-selling author Brian Fagan explores the world of the Cro-Magnons--the mysterious, little-known race, famous for its cave paintings, that survived the Ice Age and became the ancestors of today's humans.

They survived by their wits in a snowbound world, hunting, and sometimes being hunted by, animals many times their size. By flickering firelight, they drew bison, deer, and mammoths on cavern walls- vibrant images that seize our imaginations after thirty thousand years. They are known to archaeologists as the Cro-Magnons-but who were they? Simply put, these people were among the first anatomically modern humans. For millennia, their hunter-gatherer culture flourished in small pockets across Ice Age Europe, the distant forerunner to the civilization we live in now.

Bestselling author Brian Fagan brings these early humans out of the deep freeze with his trademark mix of erudition, cutting-edge science, and vivid storytelling. Cro-Magnon reveals human society in its infancy, facing enormous environmental challenges from glaciers, predators, and a rival species of humans-the Neanderthals. Cro-Magnon captures the adaptability that has made humans an unmatched success as a species. Living on a frozen continent with only crude tools, Ice Age humans survived and thrived. In these pages, we meet our most remarkable ancestors.

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Brian Fagan is the New York Times bestselling author of several books including The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, Little History of Archaeology, Fishing: How the Sea Fed Civilization, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850, The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization and Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans.