1834: Cro-Magnons - The book of science

Cro-Magnons
A place in time
Myth
Commentary

Édouard Lartet, Louis Lartet primatology

Cro-Magnons

Édouard Lartet, fascinated with fossils,
found countless fossilized mammal bones
digging in Sansan Hill in Gascony,
including the first fossil anthropoid jawbone
of the species named Pliopithecus antiquus
leading to the conjecture
that early apes and humans
lived together far back in time.
Édouard and his son, Louis, excavated a cave
near Aurignac in southern France
where human bones had been found in a rabbit hole
and found more human bones
associated with the bones of extinct animals.
The idea that we used to eat
mammals that have become extinct
was too strange for people to accept readily
but then Louis discovered
bones of humans buried purposefully
with stone tools and perforated shells and animal teeth,
among scattered bones of lion, reindeer, and mammoth,
under an outcropping of rock
near Les Eyzes in the Dordogne,
in an area known as Cro-Magnon.

A place in time

A dot on the horizon of the ocean
was an ocean liner.
Far back in time
was a home we used to live in
during a childhood we cannot remember.

Myth

Anatomically modern humans
lived and died beside extinct mammals
well before the stories in Genesis.
What kind of myth is this
excavated from the floors of caves?
Obviously, these people could not have been
as smart as we are today.

I have stubbornly resisted the idea that our own kind is special in the capabilities of our hearts or minds. Other animals also have hearts and minds and it is narrow-minded to assume that they do not use them in the same ways we use ours. Our record of intelligence is not matched by our ability to control and to manufacture; other animals have better histories of survival without killing others or destroying the environment that their survival depends on. The fact that Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals are gone today does not show that they were incapable of surviving, accepting the possibility that our ancestors killed them. Our record of narrow-mindedness and lack of sympathy to others is well established and might be blinding us to the fact that they are us.

The discoveries of Édouard and Louis Lartet did a little to overthrow our self-centeredness.