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As we have noted, it was formerly thought by paleontologists that Neanderthal morphed into Cro-Magnon, and that Cro-Magnon was the progenitor of human beings as we know them today. However, aside from the problems of the Eve Hypothesis, there are serious problems with the assumptions about when modern human types actually appeared on Earth. Even if we take the evolving scientific view of the present day, we find that Cro-Magnon man was something altogether different from other anatomically modern humans.

Over and over again we read in scientific studies that Cro-Magnon man was just an “anatomically modern human”. The experts will say: “The Cro-Magnons lived in Europe between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. They are virtually identical to modern man, being tall and muscular and slightly more robust than most modern humans.” Notice how they slip in that “slightly more robust” bit. The fact is, the Cro-Magnon man was, compared to the other “anatomically modern humans” around him, practically a superman. They were skilled hunters, toolmakers and artists famous for the cave art at places such as Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira. They had a high cranium, a broad and upright face, and cranial capacity “about the same as modern humans” (can we say larger?), but less than that of Neanderthals. The males were as tall as 6 feet. They appeared in Europe in the upper Pleistocene, about 40,000 years ago and “their geographic origin is still unknown ”. Their skeletal remains show a “few small differences from modern humans”. Of course, the “out of Africa” theory advocates suggest that Cro-Magnon came from Sub Saharan Africa and a temperate climate and that, “they would eventually adapt to all extremes of heat and cold”. In this way, the “slight differences” between Cro-Magnon and other forms of anatomically modern humans can be explained away as an adaptation to cold. But, as we will see, this idea doesn’t hold water.

Cro-Magnon’s tools are described as the Aurignacian technology, characterized by bone and antler tools, such as spear tips (the first) and harpoons. They also used animal traps, and bow and arrow. They invented shafts and handles for their knives, securing their blades with bitumen, a kind of tar, as long as 40 thousand years ago. Other improvements included the invention of the atlatl, a large bone or piece of wood with a hooked groove used for adding distance and speed to spears. They also invented more sophisticated spear points, such as those that detach after striking and cause greater damage to prey. 144 The Cro-Magnon type man was also the “originator” of such abstract concepts as “time”. They marked time by lunar phases, recording them with marks on a piece of bone, antler or stone. Some of these “calendars” contained a record of as many as 24 lunations. 145 In the relatively recent past, tool industries diversified. The Gravettian industry (25 to 15 thousand years ago), characterized by ivory tools such as backed blades, is associated with mammoth hunters. One type of brief industry was Solutrean, occurring from 18 to 15 thousand years ago and limited to Southwest France and Spain. It is characterized by unique and finely crafted “laurel leaf” blades, made with a pressure technique requiring a great skill. The industry is associated with horse hunters. The tool industry of the Clovis Culture in North America (11 to 8 thousand years ago) is notable for its remarkable similarity to Solutrean . Some suggest that the Solutrean culture migrated to North America around 12,000 thousand years ago. 146 Cro-Magnon people lived in tents and other man-made shelters in groups of several families. They were nomadic hunter-gatherers and had elaborate rituals for hunting, birth and death. Multiple burials are common in the areas where they were found. What is most interesting is that from 35 to 10 thousand years ago, there was no differentiation by sex or age in burials. They included special grave goods, as opposed to everyday, utilitarian objects, suggesting a very increased ritualization of death and burial.. 147 144 Eric Whitaker, Steve Stewart; Article Reviews; Late Ice Age Hunting Technology (Heidi Knecht) Scientific American, July 1994.

145 Marshack, Alexander, The Roots Of Civilization - Moyer (Mt. Kisco, New York: Bell Limited 1991).

146 Preston, Douglas, “The Lost Man”, New Yorker Magazine, June 16, 1997. 147 Schirtzinger, Erin, The Evidence for Pleistocene Burials, Neanderthals versus Modern Humans, December 6, 1994. They were the first confirmed to have domesticated animals, starting by about 15 thousand years ago (though ancient sapiens may have domesticated the dog as much as 200 thousand years ago). They were the first to leave extensive works of art, such as cave paintings and carved figures of animals and pregnant women. Huge caves lavishly decorated with murals depicting animals of the time were at first rejected as fake for being too sophisticated. Then they were dismissed as being primitive, categorized as hunting, fertility or other types of sympathetic magic. Re-evaluations have put these great works of art in a more prominent place in art history. They show evidence of motifs, of following their own stylistic tradition, of “impressionist” like style, perspective, and innovative use of the natural relief in the caves. Also possible, considering the new concepts of time reckoning practiced by Cro-Magnon, are abstract representations of the passage of time, such as spring plants in bloom, or pregnant bison that might represent summer. 148 Aside from pregnant women and other Goddess worship iconography, 149 representations of people, “anthropomorphs,” are very few, and never show the accuracy or detail of the other animals. Humans are represented in simple outlines without features, sometimes with “masks”, often without regard to proportion, being distorted and isolated. At the Grottes des Enfants in France are found four burials with red ocher, and associated with Aurignacian tools. At Lascaux , France, are the famous caves of upper Paleolithic cave art, dated to 17 thousand years ago, and even older, in some cases, by many thousands of years! 148 Reeser, Ken, “Earliest Art: Representative Art In The Upper Paleolithic Era”, 1994 (after: Marshack, 1991; Grand, 1967; Ucko, Peter J., and Rosenfeld, Andre, 1967; Brown, G. Baldwin, 1932; Breuil, Abbe H., date unknown) (unpublished).

149 Stone, Merlin, When God Was A Woman (San Diego, New York, London: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1976).

The modern human types that appeared in the Levant were, however, somewhat different from Cro-Magnon. They were the sub-Saharan type, less “robust” individuals than the Cro-Magnon “superman” of Europe.

What seems to be the truth of the matter is simply that the modern humans of the Levant were “different” from the Cro-Magnon types that “appeared” in Europe. Try as they would, there is simply was no way to prove that Cro-Magnon evolved in Africa or the Levant and then moved to Europe.

But then, how to explain what happened in any reasonable terms? What the archaeological record seems to show is that in Europe, after millennia of almost no progress at all, even in the few areas where modern man has been found, suddenly human culture seems to take off like an explosion with the appearance of Cro-Magnon man. Not only does culture explode, but also new ways of doing things, new styles and innovations that were utterly unknown in the period immediately preceding them, suddenly appear, only to disappear again like an outdated fad. From Spain to the Urals, sites list the developments of sewing needles, barbed projectiles, fishhooks, ropes, meat drying racks, temperature controlled hearths, and complex dwellings.

The most amazing part of all of it is the art. Art suddenly springs onto the landscape, fully formed, with no period of gradual development; no signs of childish attempts preceding it. A piece of ivory carved 32,000 years ago is as realistic as anything turned out by the most accomplished carver of the present day.

The Upper Paleolithic signals the most fundamental change in human behavior that the archaeological record may ever reveal. 150 The only explanation for this tremendous change is that a new kind of human appeared on the earth stage. 150 Richard Klein, Stanford, quoted by Shreeve.

When we consider the difficulties of such an event, in terms of “evolution”, we find that this presents a huge difficulty in our understanding. First of all, we still have the problem of a 60,000-year time lag between the appearance of the sub-Saharan modern type man who was on the scene with no “improvements” in his technology for that length of time. If Cro-Magnon evolved in Africa, why isn’t there a continuous record of incremental developments?

By the same reasoning, if he evolved only after crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, why isn’t there a continuous record of incremental developments? The most effective and popular way that science deals with this crisis is to ignore it, to deny it, or to seek to twist the facts to fit the theory. Many archaeologists continue to account for the cultural events of the Upper Paleolithic by tying them to the emergence of a more modern, intellectually superior form of human being from Africa. They propose a “second biological event” to explain this, never mind that it left no tracks in any skeletal shape.

Nowadays, the idea is to suggest that the other “modern men” of sub-Saharan Africa were not really fully modern. They were “near-modern”. Thus, Africa is preserved as the origin of all mankind, and the only thing necessary was a breakthrough in the African lineage, a “neurological event” that allowed this “new man” to develop all these new cultural behaviors overnight, so to say. What this amounts to is saying that the explosion of culture in the Upper Paleolithic times did not happen earlier because other modern men didn’t have the brains to make it happen. Unfortunately, the support for this idea amounts only to circular logic. What’s more, it seems that if it were a “neurological event”, it would start in a small place and spread outward. But what seems to have happened is that it sort of exploded in a lot of places at once: from Spain to the Ural mountains in Russia! And in fact, the Middle East is the LAST place where art appears .

The earliest known Aurignacian sites are in the Balkans, and they are dated to around 43,000 years ago. Three thousand years later, the Aurignacian craze is all over Europe.

We ought to note that the Neanderthals did not have art . What’s more, there was essentially no change in their stone tools for 100,000 years.

Some people suggest that the impetus for culture was the sudden development of speech. But that idea doesn’t hold much water either. If we were to look at some of the aboriginal societies of Australia and New Guinea , they are certainly Neanderthal like in their stone tools. But they think and communicate in languages that are as rich as ours, and they construct myths, stories and cosmologies with these languages. They just don’t seem to be much interested in technology. There is another very strange thing about this explosion of homo intellectualis technologicus: it seems to have sort of “lost its steam” around 12,000 years ago. We have already noted the pottery making of the Jomon . Even more startling is the fact that twenty-six thousand years ago the residents of Dolni Vestonice were firing ceramics in kilns. But you don’t read that in archaeology textbooks. In the standard teachings, the emergence of ceramics is linked to the functional use of pottery which supposedly did not appear until the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic period some 12,000 years after the kilns at Dolni were last used. Oh dear! Did we just stumble on something interesting? Didn’t we just note that something happened to “cool” the steam of the cultural explosion of the Upper Paleolithic and that it happened about 12,000 years ago? And we noted that the Jomon culture “began” at about the same time. And here we note that the agricultural revolution occurred at about the same time as that “loss of creative vigor”. Could the two have some connection?

In Bulgaria, a thousand miles to the east of Dolni Vestonice, there is a cave called Bacho Kiro . It is famous for containing the earliest known Aurignacian tool assemblages. They are 43,000 years old.

This brings us to another curious thing about Neanderthal man: he never seemed to go anywhere. He always made his tools out of what was locally available, and he never seemed to travel at all. What was made where it was made, stayed there. Nobody traded or shared among the Neanderthal groups. But it seems that right from the beginning, Cro-Magnon man was traveling and sharing and exchanging not only goods, but technology. If there was a better form of stone somewhere else, the word seemed to get around, and everybody had some of it. Distinctive flints from southern Poland are found at Dolni Vestonice, a hundred miles to the south. Slovakian radiolarite of red, yellow and olive is found a hundred miles to the east. Later in the Upper Paleolithic period, the famous “chocolate flint” of southern Poland is found over a radius of two hundred and fifty miles. 151 151 Shreeve, op. cit. Naturally, these rocks didn’t walk around on their own. Human legs carried them. And that leads us to our next little problem with Cro-Magnon man: You see, his legs were too long.

One of the sacred laws of evolutionary biology is called “ Allen’s Rule ”. This rule posits that legs, arms, ears, and other body extremities should be shorter in mammals that live in cold climates, and longer in mammals of the same period who live where it is hot. This is because having short arms and legs conserves heat. This is supposed to explain why Eskimos and Laplanders have short legs. It also is supposed to explain why Bantu people are leaner, and the Maasai are extremely long and lean in their tropical open country.

The only people who seem to be mocking Allen’s rule are Cro-Magnon . They just refused to adapt. They all have much longer legs than they ought to. Of course, this is pounced upon as proof that they came from Africa. The only problem with this is that it is hard to imagine people from a warm climate migrating to a cold one by choice. Then, on top of that, to remain long-limbed for over a thousand generations? Keep in mind that, during that time, the thermometer kept going down and, at the glacial maximum, 18,000 years ago, it was like the North Pole in northern Europe! So how come they didn’t adapt?

By whatever means they arrived in Europe, we ought to take note of the fact that their presence there may be related to the fact that Europe and other nearby locations are literally blanketed with megaliths. Indeed, it may be so that the megaliths came long after the appearance of Cro-Magnon man, but the connection ought not to be discarded without some consideration.

We have still another problem here, and it has to do with dating. Analyzing mitochondrial DNA data to reconstruct the demographic prehistory of Homo Sapiens reveals statistical evidence of explosive growth around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. Is there a connection between this DNA evidence and the appearance of Cro-Magnon man? If so, it would mean that the DNA is dated to twice the age that archaeology confirms. Instead of assuming that the archaeological dates are correct, perhaps we ought to ask the question: could something be wrong with the dating? From a morphological point of view as well as judging by their industry and art, these highly evolved humans who coexisted with Neanderthal man represent a mutation so enormous and sudden as to be absurd in the context of evolutionary theory.

What in the world are we going to do with this problem? I could exhaustively describe the endless books and papers that seek to explain it away; to account for it, to marginalize it, and even ignore it. But at the end of it all, the fundamental problem still remains: a new kind of man appeared on the planet, seemingly from nowhere , and he was smart, artistic, and however he got here, he landed in a lot of places simultaneously.

Did I say “landed”? Yes, I did. Am I suggesting that Cro-Magnon man was an alien? Not exactly. We still have to consider the mitochondrial DNA of Eve. I also haven’t forgotten that annoying problem of the Asian vs. African origins of the “first mother” that has been so deftly dealt with by avoidance and non-answers. What do all of these factors, taken together, suggest? Well, any farmer can figure that one out: it suggests hybridization . But that would imply somebody doing the hybridizing. Further, we might wish to make note of the range of this culture that suddenly dropped in on Europe: from Spain (and a small region of North Africa) to the Ural Mountains that are at the border of Central Asia.

The steppes of Central Asia, just north of Turkmenia, are a difficult environment for agriculture. Goats and sheep and cattle bones are found there that date to about 4000 BC. Later, the camel and horse came into use. These cultures spoke Indo-European languages and their members are believed to have been Caucasoid. There have been many theories that the Caucasoid nomads of the Central Asian steppes migrated to Europe. But, as we have seen, the initial migration may have been from West to East. The archaeological record is uncertain, and therefore the migrations of the Indo-Europeans (for so we may most assuredly call them) from the Asian steppes are no longer as clear in the minds of scholars as they once were. 152 The migrations into India and Pakistan, however, do seem to have some firmer foundation. 152 Renfrew, 1973, 1987.

These incursions were most likely from the Andronovo and Srubnaya cultures as the culture described in the oldest Aryan texts is very similar to that of the steppe nomads. Return to Origen de La Vida y Del Hombre