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.