Cro-Magnon
The Cro-Magnons, the first modern humans to settle in Europe, are best known for their magnificent cave art, which has obsessed generations of scholars. But this is only part of a complex, fascinating story.

Cro-Magnon traces the ancestry of the first modern Europeans back to tropical Africa, then dissects their complex relationship with the indigenous Neanderthals, whose ancestry goes back more than 150,000 years. This is a story set against a backdrop of dramatic climate change during the late Ice Age, followed by rapid global warming after 15,000 years ago. The narrative covers the first human settlement of Europe and the appearance of the Neanderthals, the catastrophic volcanic eruption that nearly wiped out the earliest modern Africans 73,000 years ago, and the rapid move out of Africa after 60,000 years ago that brought remote ancestors of the Cro-Magnons to the Near East and then to the threshold of Europe itself. Cutting edge science reveals the details of first settlement and enables us to paint a portrait of Cro-Magnons as dynamic, ingenious people, who survived the harshest millennia of the late Ice Age, then thrived in the rapidly warming temperatures of natural global warming after 15,000 years ago. This is a story of ingenuity and opportunism, of people with an intimate, powerful relationship with the supernatural world around them, the distant ancestors of many Europeans today. It is, above all, a story of ingenious adjustment to climate change at a critical time in human history.