Talk:Cro-Magnon

58,000 year old aboriginal DNA contradicts the article

it is thought that aborigines and papuens diverged from other humans 58,000 years ago... This article's text 37,000 years as being the end of the first wave of humans. Crew Magnum is a relic early science which is not used in english anthropology any more. that should be mentioned Lifeinthetrees (talk) 05:02, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Indeed, this must be mentioned in the opening. I would do it is i could find a valid scientific reference for the depreciation of the term. Sperxios (talk) 08:25, 3 September 2024 (UTC)

Thought on cro magnum man

Was curious about cromagnum man and some ended up with what seemed a preoccupation of sexuality and the assumed roles. What I couldn’t help but notice especially in the sense of hiarchy hunter gatherer was that the female would have been almost continuously pregnant and limited during a good deal of the time and also put at greater risk. It seemed this topic had a preoccupation with references from feminist. Not that are differences were mutually beneficial, instead there seemed to be a lot of effort to as they say. say it ain’t so. 2600:1700:14B0:9A60:F109:B46D:35D1:3DA8 (talk) 06:00, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Hello and thanks, but your not being very specific in either intent or reason. Is this a request; do you have sources / areas of research you think should be emphasised? Ceoil (talk) 06:46, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Source?

"The earliest Cro-Magnon specimens also exhibit some features that are reminiscent of those found in Neanderthals. The first Cro-Magnons would have had darker skin tones than most modern Europeans; natural selection for lighter skin would not have begun until 30,000 years ago." What is the source for this claim? Also, the paragraph this is from and the next two paragraphs have no sources cited for anything in those three paragraphs. 76.202.192.102 (talk) 20:10, 28 June 2025 (UTC)

See section Cro-Magnon#Physical_attributes which has the sources for this piece of information. The lede section summarizes the entire article and is not required to have a source for every single statement as long as it is sourced in the respective section of the main text of the article. –Austronesier (talk) 07:24, 26 July 2026 (UTC)

Etymology

Sorry if I missed it but I wasn't able to find anything about the origin for usage of the term 'Cro-Magnon'. It appears that it might have been the name of a place in France. But even after checking Cro-Magnon rock shelter, it just describes itself as a "site" where Cro-Magnon men, the topic of this article, were found. But I want to know, was the term 'Cro-Magnon' already used in France to refer to the place where, later in human history, discoveries were made? Like was the cave in the Cro-Magnon river valley or on Mount Cro-Magnon or something? Or, was the term 'Cro-Magnon' coined by someone at the time of the discovery? Thanks! Gibson Flying V (talk) 18:46, 25 July 2025 (UTC)

it's in the Cro-Magnon rock shelter section, "The site is called Abri de Cro-Magnon (Cro-Magnon rock shelter), now recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Abri means 'rock shelter' in French, cro means 'hole' in Occitan, and Magnon was the landowner" Dunkleosteus77 (talk) 18:49, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

"First early modern humans (Homo sapiens) found in Europe and Siberia"

This statement is not current, and the rest of the article relies on it to the point that I'm not sure how it can be modified without a lot of rewrite.

To date:

1. Apidima 1 is clearly sapiens and dated to around 200kya (Harvati)
2. Neanderthal femur from HST cave in Germany has a sapiens mtDNA lineage with a ~270ka divergence (Cosimo Posth et al 2017)
3. Vindija Neanderthals have a sapiens introgression dating to around 200ka, from a sapiens ghost lineage (many people have published on this, most have a nice looking phylogeny showing the extinct sapiens lineage 200-250ka).

So it is very clear that there was a previous sapiens migration into Europe which was at least somewhat established, and then went extinct prior to Cro-Magnon arrival (or, CM completely wiped them out with zero admixture as no living humans contain signatures from this group outside of it making it into them through the Neanderthal admixture). This culture was not ethnically or culturally the same as Cro-Magnon and I don't know how much they should be discussed here, but lots of content here currently relies and builds on the "first sapiens" thing. Mausfield (talk) 08:29, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

For context, this is not WP:OR, the ~200kya sapiens ghost lineage is a widely discussed topic in the last 10 years. Any paper with a phylogeny of this family (sapiens, neanderthals, and denisovans) since then wil have this extinct sapiens population contributing about ~5% to the Eurasian Neanderthal genome about 208-250kya. So it is very much a well-established and relevant piece of the puzzle. There is a growing body of anthropologists who think this population was responsible for Neanderthals achieving the controlled use of fire and perhaps other cultural trappings. Mausfield (talk) 01:23, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

None of these are as concrete as you're portraying them. I'm not sure how you're getting the eroded Apidima skull fragment is "clearly" a modern human skull. If the 270kya Neanderthal femur indeed has a modern mtDNA trace your claim would assume that this mtDNA originated in modern humans and also that Neanderthals populations were incapable of moving between Germany and the Levant themselves (in other words only modern human populations could've traveled so far over such a long period of time). Same with Vindija, assumes these Neanderthals never moved for hundreds of thousands of years and needed modern humans to get there for such introgression to occur. This is not to say that modern humans only colonized Europe once, famous example is the Romanian Oase 2 which has no living descendent but this is not so ancient. Also there is no evidence to suggest the introgression from the 200,000 year old ghost lineage happened outside of Africa Dunkleosteus77 (talk) 02:13, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

"Also there is no evidence to suggest the introgression from the 200,000 year old ghost lineage happened outside of Africa"

You seem to be confused on this point, but to avoid making this a "me vs you" thing, I'll just add that every paper published on this topic disagrees with you, and leave it at that.

"If the 270kya Neanderthal femur indeed has a modern mtDNA"

This is a 10 year old piece of evidence and I would strongly suggest being up to date on this topic if you want to debate it. Mausfield (talk) 22:11, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

To put a head on it, though: what you're saying also fundamentally makes no sense with the current evidence because the 200kya+ sapiens introgression into Neanderthals contains sequences present in modern humans only from Neanderthal introgression, and entirely endogenously absent from modern Africans. So you would need population genetic support of a large (20k+ Ne), 250kya+ sapiens lineage that existed in Africa with *zero* admixing to any other African sapiens population, privately admixed with Neanderthals but somehow not Denisovans even though they split in Eurasia. Mausfield (talk) 22:22, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

A good summary on this from Svante Pääbo and Hugo Zeberg. See Fig 1. The purple arrow pointing towards the sapiens branch is the Neanderthal contribution to Cro-Magnons from the ancestor of Vindija and El Sidron after that ancestor diverged from Altai, this is where living people with Eurasian heritage get their Neanderthal sequences. The earlier, rightwards blue arrow is the 200+kya introgression of this extinct sapiens offshoot (which diverged either prior to the African sapiens expansion or early in that process, see Fig 3 in Kuhlwilm et al's original paper on this from 2016) into the ancestors of Altai and Vindija Neanderthals but after the divergence with Denisovans. Some Cro-Magnons got pieces of those extinct sapiens introgressions back during their admixture, and we can identify those because they are otherwise absent from every living human. The only alternative to this is that this population was some intermediary after the divergence from the archaic branch and before sympatric move into sapiens. Which.... I've never heard anyone say.

It would suffice to add something like "the earliest surviving sapiens population to establish in Europe" or something to that effect. Oase 2 is a good illustrative example of local extinction of lineages within population substructure but that individual still descended from same African sapiens metapopulation that all living non-African ancestry derives from. That is in contrast to this ~200kya group, because they left no surviving lineages, the only genetic remnants of it are its footprint in Neanderthal genomes, which some of us carry from the 46-55kya archaic admixtures. Mausfield (talk) 06:40, 22 July 2026 (UTC)

I agree that "First early modern humans (Homo sapiens) found in Europe and Siberia" is something we cannot say anymore with the same amount of confidence as let's say 10 years ago. Catching up with the discussion above, I nevertheless want to clarify a few things that lack a bit of nuance and precision:

1. It looks like there is indeed an emerging consensus that Apidima 1 is H. sapiens, even if there have been a number of dissenting voices that classify it as Neanderthal (one is cited in this article). Note that two sources (Cole et al. (2026) and Grün et al. (2023)) discussing these proposals observe that it requires to extend the width of morphological variation for Neanderthals beyond what has been hitherto observed, in order for Apidima 1 to fit in as a Neanderthal, whereas OTOH, Apidima 1 falls well within the range of H. sapiens. Yet, both Grün et al. (2023) and Cole et al. (2026) conclude their discussion of Apidima 1 with almost the same cautious words: "If Apidima is indeed a[n early] H. sapiens...", so "clearly sapiens" is probably still premature.
2. The HST femur is not 270kya (and @Mausfield hasn't said that). It is hard if impossible to date, but Posth et al. place it among the late Neanderthals. 270kya is just their lower limit for the date of the ingression of sapiens mtDNA into HST.
3. The existence of sapiens admixture in late Neanderthal individuals only provides evidence for the admixture event itself, but not for the actual location where it might have taken place. An in situ admixture with subsequent immobility of more that 100,000 years up to the time of Vindija is definitely not the default assumption. Li et al. (2024) explicitly address this question in reference to Apidima 1: "Of particular relevance is the Apidima 1 fossil from the Apidima Cave in southern Greece that dates to ~210 ka, which show that these early out-of-Africa diasporas were not confined to the Levant, but in some cases covered substantial distances. Although it is difficult to speculate on where ths first wave of H → N admixture occurred, sequencing more Neanderthal genomes that span additional points in space and time would be fruitful in addressing this question" (emphasis added).

That said, I have no good idea about how to the change the current overconfident phrasing. I'm fine with "the earliest surviving sapiens population to establish in Europe" at this point. –Austronesier (talk) 12:24, 26 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughts. Just for clarification, I'm not relying on the existence of the H→N event as evidence of location, I'm relying on what divegences occure before and after it to rule out locations. I don't want to bludgeon, so I'll just say that the claim of this happening in Africa requires me to believe half a dozen things which are each individually not credible for different reasons. That the other popuation here is sapiens is not controversial: the mtDNA and chrY lineages that introgress into Neanderthals 370-220kya are very clearly sapiens, because sapiens is what we call the human lineage which isn't Neanderthals and Denisovans. Those haplotypes are also extinct in living humans, outside archaic ancestry. And, I will note that its not like Apidima was some gigantic sea change, it's only about 20k older than Levantine sapiens, and I will here highlight one fact: every single human population who lived in the Levant contined expanding into Europe and Asia. So we now also have to argue that this H in the H→N was the first to fail. And that Apidima is something else entirely. Etc.

I just cannot fathom how someone can even entertain Cro-Magnon as the first sapiens in Eurasia at this point, let alone feel highly confient in it, other than just by not having an up to date reading in the literature.

This figure from Josh Akey's blog post is helpful is seeing how the time point of the H→N event actually does exlcude Africa as an option. When Li et al mention the fuzziness of location (which is absolutely correct), they're talking about "where in Eurasia". Not "where on the planet". Mausfield (talk) 09:15, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

every single human population who lived in the Levant contined expanding into Europe and Asia: exactly. That's why the sapiens ingression in the genome of late Neanderthals cannot serve as a piece of positive evidence for a sapiens presence in Europe. The ingression might just as well have occurred in the Levant (FWIW: who actually argues for it to have taken place in Africa?). So the only good piece of evidence for an early OoA incursion into Europe is the fossil record, viz. Apidima 1.

To focus on the matter of the questionable opening sentence of the article: which study covering the H → N ingression expicitly makes a case for Europe (and the Levant) as the location of where this ingression occurred? If there is, it will be highly relevant for improving this article. If not, we should not draw conclusions from studies that the authors themselves don't make. –Austronesier (talk) 16:51, 27 July 2026 (UTC)

> So the only good piece of evidence for an early OoA incursion into Europe is the fossil record, viz. Apidima 1.

That is not correct. The fact that no living humans contain these haplotypes mean this population spent an extended period of time somewhere reproductively isolated from African sapiens populations. This cannot be in the Levant, because there is continuous gene flow from that region into NE Africa, including back and forth between Levantine neanderthals who we do not have evidence carried these haplotypes. I get that the skeletal elements are attention grabbers, but you cannot ignore the population genetic evidence and the options it excludes from likelihood based on the tenable tree structures.

> If not, we should not draw conclusions from studies that the authors themselves don't make.

I mean, I don't mean to be too pointed, but the point you're making is very much in conflict with how the people who published these papers talk about it. Including Harvati. You could make the argument she's gung ho about it because it's her site, but it's not as if she's alone in the position by any means. It is generally the consensus among people who with in the genetic history of Europe that there is a failed sapiens migration into Europe which does not have living descendants among modern human populations. Reich has said the same, as has Krause I believe. And Hublin.

Additionally, the opposing positions requires you to accept that everything from Miocene hominids to erectus to late hybridized Neanderthals set foot in Western Europe prior to 50kya, except sapiens who we already know are continuously inhabit the Levant to at least 190kya (Misliya maxilla). That to me is virtually unbelievable. However at this point we are debating a topic and not the article. To me, it is categorically incorrect to include in an encyclopedia an article-wide framing from a position which is almost untenable among current paleoanthropologists. Mausfield (talk) 18:32, 16 August 2026 (UTC)

On your point on the extinction of modern human mitochondrial and Y-chromosome lineages, that's more about mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam it's simply a statistical phenomenon that if a father only has daughters his Y-chromosomal lineage ends and if a mother only has sons (or her daughters-in-law overwrite her mt) her mitochondrial lineage ends, so of course you will get extinct mt or Y types when you go back that far when/before mt Eve and Y-Adam originated. Also "sapiens is what we call the human lineage which isn't Neanderthals and Denisovans" do you mean to say that sapiens is defined by what it isn't? Per https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.09.066 Sub-Saharan African populations do indeed have Neanderthal introgression most likely from modern humans moving across Afro-Eurasia but not necessarily Europe. Modern humans were and are mobile but there's no reason to think that modern humans were occupying Europe at this point in time just because on a map of the world Israel looks close to the Bosphorus especially when those lands were already inhabited. Miocene Europe was tropical jungle and woodland so yes great apes made it up there. Dunkleosteus77 (talk) 03:47, 17 August 2026 (UTC)

Aight, this is my last comment here. This has become way too much of a bummer and basically amounts to me tutoring you in the basics of genetics and paleoanthro at every turn, which I'm sure is annoying. It certainly is for me.

A few weeks ago, you stated:

Also there is no evidence to suggest the introgression from the 200,000 year old ghost lineage happened outside of Africa

I told you that was wrong, and you disagreed. Now, you show me Sarah Tishkoff's paper that (of course) says:

However, most Neanderthal homologous regions in sub-Saharan African populations originate from migration of AMH populations from Africa to Eurasia ∼250 kya, and subsequent admixture with Neanderthals, resulting in ∼6% AMH ancestry in Neanderthals.

So maybe you need to actually reach a point of competency on this topic before getting into debates over it. I'm quite happy to continue discussing this with you after that point. Until then, when you say stuff like "there is no evidence", this is simply tantamount to dishonesty, because you are not familiar with the current landscape of evidence.

Modern humans were and are mobile but there's no reason to think that modern humans were occupying Europe at this point in time

You just cited a three year-old paper which states a position you said there is no evidence for, again like three weeks ago. Sorry, but I simply do not consider you competent enough in this topic to declare what reason or evidence exists to judge these positions. I imagine yet another straw man will follow here so I will explicitly state that I'm not talking about credentials at all.

Email Sarah Tishkoff and ask her what she thinks.

On your point on the extinction of modern human mitochondrial and Y-chromosome lineages, that's more about mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam it's simply a statistical phenomenon that if a father only has daughters his Y-chromosomal lineage ends and if a mother only has sons (or her daughters-in-law overwrite her mt) her mitochondrial lineage ends, so of course you will get extinct mt or Y types when you go back that far when/before mt Eve and Y-Adam originated.

I don't really blame you for this misunderstanding because most of the pop science articles I've read make the same mistake, because people really don't understand drift. You are confusing individual sex-biased inheritance of SNPs with an entire chromosome. A ChrY haplogroup is a tree. There is a backbone of shared loci relative to some outgroup, and smaller branches will carry their own private alleles. If an entire species worth of ChrY lineages goes extict and one lineage from a short-term introgression remains, to call that a drift is pretty insane. You would need drift to arbitrarily pick alleles unique to the wild type NChrY to prune, and leave the AMH ones alone, which makes zero sense under any hypothesis of inbreeding because that would apply to Neanderthals with the AMH lineages as well. The "small, isolated groups" thing also doesn't work because a selective sweep of the AMH ChrY from Spain to Siberia by definition means a continent-wide reproductive range. This is true of Vindija, Altai, and El Sidron, and not Denisovans whose ChrY divergence with Neanderthals is on par with the autosomal date range. Lastly, the divergence between the sapiens and Neanderthal ChrY at ~370kya is on the order of at least 450,000 years, longer than the current tenure of our species and therefore its not just a few SNPs which might be pruned from drift, its almost half a million years of accumulated ChrY variation. Mausfield (talk) 13:27, 17 August 2026 (UTC)