Re: Why is the CroMagnon Man extinct?

Thanks for the great question, Joe. I'm sure there are lots of people who are puzzled by this same thing. Fortunately, the answers are fairly straightforward.

First of all, lets take a look at the main part of your question, "why is the Cro-Magnon extinct?" The term Cro-Magnon refers to an area in southern France where prehistoric human remains were found in 1868. The skeletal remains of the ancient people found in those caves were named Cro-Magnon Man after the place they were found. This may seem strange way to name a skeleton, but the places where skeletons are found are very important paleontologists . Some other famous remains named after the place that they were found are Java Man, Peking Man, Neandertal Man, Kennewick Man, and Cheddar Man.

Over time, the name given to one set of skeletal remains sometimes comes to be associated with all of the people who lived in that same area at that same time, and who shared characteristics observed in the original skeletal remains. So, names like Neandertal Man, Peking Man and Cro-Magnon Man came to be used to refer to (presumably) large groups of prehistoric people. In particular, Cro-Magnon Man is used to refer to anatomcially modern people living throughout Europe and the Middle East about 40,000 years ago. They looked much like the people living in Europe and the Middle East do today.

Much confusion about the history of our species stems from people mistaking the names of discrete skeletal remains with names of distinct species. In fact, the skeletal remains that I listed above are derived from three distinct species in the genus Homo. The Peking Man and Java Man skeletons are both members of the Homo erectus species, thanks to new DNA evidence, the Neandertal Man skeleton is now classified as a member of the Homo neandertalis species, and the Cro-Magnon Man and Cheddar Man skeletons are members of the Homo sapiens species. Homo erectus was the ancestral species that gave rise to Homo sapiens and Homo neandertalis, two (probably unrelated) sister species. Coincidentally, you and I and everyone else on earth are all members of the Homo sapiens species.

The reason why the Homo erectus and Homo neandertalis species went extinct is a big mystery. Homo erectus had a smaller brain than Homo neandertalis or Homo sapiens, so members of that species might not have been able to keep up with the competition. But there seem to be some instances where all three species lived in the same place at the same time. All we really know is that for about 40,000 years, Homo sapiens has been the only species in the genus Homo.

So from this, I hope that you can see that Cro-Magnon Man did not go extinct. Cro-Magnon Man was a Homo sapien, just like the rest of us. Cro-Magnon Man is still very much alive.

Finally, as part of your question, you made an assumption that "man evolved from apes". It is more accurate to say that both humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor who lived millions of years ago and had both "apelike" and "humanlike" characteristics. This common ancestor is now extinct, and we don't even really know what it looked like, but we do know that it wasn't an ape like a Gorilla or a Chimpanzee. The modern ape species that we find today (Humans, Gorillas, Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Orang-Utans, and Gibbons) are the descendants of common ancestral species that were probably as different from the modern species as any of the modern species are from each other.