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Reviews for Cro-Magnon:

“[A] fascinating account…Fagan’s narratives of cave-painting and hunting – among other anecdotes – really bring this history-laden book to life.”—Sierra Magazine Read full review.

“Highly entertaining and instructive...Fagan] does an admirable job in bringing vividly to life the Europe of between eighty and ten thousand years ago… Fagan's book has been overtaken by the onward progress of his science—this happens to lots of such books—and there are aspects of his case that invite debate. But it is an admirable book nevertheless; the re-imagining of the past is entertaingly done, and a great deal of science, especially climate science, is accessibly introduced on the way.”—AC Grayling for “The Thinking Read” on Barnes & Noble Review.

Great news. Cro-Magnon is #10 in non-fiction on the LA Times Bestseller list!

“Archaeology contributing editor Brian Fagan provides readers with intimate accounts of what he imagines Ice Age life was like for both the vanishing Neanderthals and the invading Homo sapiens who developed the basis of modern culture. He lauds the ‘endless ingenuity and adaptability’ of ordinary men and women living in bitterly cold Paleolithic Europe. ‘My DNA tells me that, genetically, I’m one of them,’ Fagan concludes, ‘and I’m proud of it.’”—Archaeology, An Editor’s Pick.

This from Shelf Awareness

Shelf Starter: Cro-Magnon Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans by Brian Fagan (Bloomsbury Press, $28, 9781596915824/ 159691582X, March 2, 2010) With all the recent publicity about DNA samples indicating that some Neanderthals may have interbred with modern humans (Cro-Magnons), these are opening lines of a book we want to read: Four dots move along a riverbank in a black and gray Ice Age landscape of 40,000 years ago, the only sign of life on a cold, late autumn day. Dense morning mist swirls gently over the slow-moving water, stirring fitfully in an icy breeze. Pine trees crowd on the riverbank, close to a large clearing where aurochs and bison paw through the snow for fodder. The fur-clad family moves slowly--a hunter with a handful of spears, his wife carrying a leather bag of dried meat, a son and daughter. The five-year-old boy dashes to and fro brandishing a small spear. His older sister stays by her mother, also carrying a skin bag. A sudden gust lifts the clinging gloom on the far side of the stream. Suddenly, the boy shouts and points, then runs in terror to his mother. The children burst into tears and cling to her. A weathered, hirsute face with heavy brows stares out quietly from the undergrowth on the other bank. Expressionless, yet watchful, its owner stands motionless, seemingly oblivious to the cold. The father looks across, waves his spear and shrugs. The face vanishes as silently as it had appeared. As light snow falls, the family resume their journey, the father as always watchful, eyes never still. During the climb to the rock shelter, he tells his children about their elusive, quiet neighbors, rarely seen and almost never encountered face-to-face. There had been more of them in his father's and grandfather's day, when he had seen them for the first time. Now sightings are unusual, especially in the cold months. They are people different from us, he explains. They do not speak like we do; we cannot understand them, but they never do us any harm. We just ignore them.... Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals: this most classic of historical confrontations, sometimes couched in terms of brutish savagery versus human sophistication, has fascinated archaeologists for generations. On the one side stand primordial humans, endowed with great strength and courage, possessed of the simplest of clothing and weaponry, seemingly incapable of fluent speech, with only limited intellectual powers. On the other are the Cro-Magnons, the first anatomically modern Europeans, with articulate speech, innovation, and all the impressive cognitive abilities of Homo sapiens. They harvest game large and small effortlessly with highly efficient weapons and enjoy a complex, sophisticated relationship with their environment, their prey, and the forces of the supernatural world. We know that the confrontation ended with the extinction of the Neanderthals, perhaps about 30,000 years ago. But how it unfolded remains one of the most challenging and fascinating of all Ice Age mysteries. --selected by Marilyn Dahl