Cro-Magnon 1: The Rock Shelter That Named Europe's Early Humans

Cro-Magnon 1 is the skull of an adult man found in 1868 in a rock shelter at Les Eyzies, in the Dordogne region of south-western France. The shelter yielded the remains of several early modern humans buried roughly 28,000 radiocarbon years ago, and its name came to stand for the people who lived in Ice Age Europe and created its famous cave art. The site is part of the Vézère Valley World Heritage Site.

Discovery during railway works

In March 1868 labourers building the railway line through the Vézère Valley were clearing rubble near the village of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac. Behind the debris they exposed a limestone rock shelter, an overhang in the cliff known locally as Cro-Magnon. Inside they found animal bones, flint tools and human remains.

The young geologist Louis Lartet, son of the prehistorian Édouard Lartet, was sent to investigate. The valley was already famous among prehistorians: Édouard Lartet and the English banker and collector Henry Christy had excavated several of its shelters earlier in the 1860s. Louis Lartet recovered the bones of several people from the back of the Cro-Magnon shelter. A plaque at the site credits a local man, François Berthoumeyrou, with the original discovery.

What was found

The remains are usually counted as belonging to at least four or five individuals: three or four adults and an infant. The best preserved is an older adult man, catalogued as Cro-Magnon 1 and often called the Old Man. Others include an adult woman whose skull bears a lesion on the forehead, and another adult man.

Cro-Magnon 1 has a long skull with a high, rounded braincase, a vertical forehead, a prominent chin and a broad, short face, all features of modern humans. The skull was studied by the French anatomist Paul Broca, who noted its large brain size. Damage and pitting on the face and skull have been variously interpreted; a 2018 study suggested a possible case of neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition, but such diagnoses from bone are uncertain.

The burials were accompanied by about 300 pierced marine shells, mostly periwinkles, which were probably sewn onto clothing or strung as ornaments, along with pendants of animal teeth and ivory.

Dating and culture

For many years the Cro-Magnon people were linked with the Aurignacian, the earliest Upper Palaeolithic culture of Europe. In 2002 the French researcher Dominique Henry-Gambier published a radiocarbon date of about 27,700 years for one of the shells associated with the burials. This places them in the later Gravettian period, a culture known for female figurines such as the Venus of Brassempouy, and makes them younger than was once thought. Calibrated to calendar years, the burials are probably several thousand years older than the raw radiocarbon figure.

The Vézère Valley setting

The Cro-Magnon shelter lies in one of the richest areas of Palaeolithic archaeology in the world. Within a few kilometres of Les Eyzies are dozens of decorated caves and occupied rock shelters, including Font-de-Gaume, Les Combarelles, La Madeleine, which gave its name to the Magdalenian culture, and Laugerie-Haute. The limestone cliffs of the Vézère and its tributaries provided natural shelters, while the river valleys attracted reindeer, horses and other game.

This concentration of sites made Les Eyzies a centre of early prehistoric research, and it is often described as a capital of prehistory. The National Museum of Prehistory, built into the cliff above the village, houses many finds from the region. The original Cro-Magnon bones, however, are held in Paris by the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle and displayed at the Musée de l’Homme.

Myths and facts

Popular images often show Cro-Magnons as tall, athletic hunters, and the skeletons from the shelter were indeed fairly tall and robust. But they were not a separate race, and their appearance varied like that of any human population. Nor were they necessarily the painters of every Ice Age cave: Europe’s cave art spans more than 20,000 years and many different groups.

How a place became a name

Because Cro-Magnon was among the first and best-publicised finds of early modern humans in Europe, its name was quickly applied to all the Upper Palaeolithic people of the continent. By the early 20th century “Cro-Magnon man” had become a popular term, contrasted with the older Neanderthals, and was associated with the cave art of sites such as Lascaux.

Some early writers treated the Cro-Magnons as a distinct race, ideas now rejected. Modern specialists see them simply as members of Homo sapiens whose ancestors came out of Africa, and many prefer the neutral term European early modern humans. Ancient DNA shows that Ice Age Europe was home to several successive populations, not a single Cro-Magnon people.

Timeline

• c. 28,000 radiocarbon years ago: Several people are buried in the Cro-Magnon shelter.
• 1863–1864: Édouard Lartet and Henry Christy begin excavations in the Vézère Valley.
• 1868, March: Railway workers expose the shelter and its human remains.
• 1868: Louis Lartet excavates the burials.
• 1979: The Vézère Valley sites are inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
• 2002: Dominique Henry-Gambier dates the burials to the Gravettian period.

Why it matters

The Cro-Magnon shelter was one of the first places to show that modern humans lived in Ice Age Europe alongside extinct animals. Its name became shorthand for those people, and the remains still feature in debates about the origins, appearance and health of Europe’s earliest Homo sapiens.