Until recently, anthropologists thought Neanderthal died out before Cro-Magnon arrived, but recent finds indicate the two co-existed until about 25,000 years ago, inviting wonderful science-fiction possibilities: tribal race war, better adaptation, better technology, luck, or even Ice Age survivability. But we do not know: lacking writing, they left us no records. What we know of them we infer from flint tools, bone shards, microbes (carbon-dated pollen-fossils enable increasingly precise site dating), and the occasional tantalus such as a petrified footprint from a fourteen-year-old who hurried across a spot of cave-floor mud not then walked on for ten thousand years.
From piles of rubble we can find tools and deduce the historical record. 35,000 years ago, early Aurignacian man learned how to make chip bi-face axes and scrapers and to grind ochre for pigments. Through the 15,000 Aurignacian years, scrapers led slowly to bone tools, extremely sharp flint blades, even flint-stick spears. They buried their dead with bead necklaces and shells brought from distant oceans. By the early Magdalenian period 15,000 years ago, the points were sharp enough to drill holes in reindeer bone, making needles and perforated batons to hold fleches or harpoons carved with single or double rows of barbs to embed in their prey.
Amidst this mute evidence, there is their art, astonishing cave drawings protected underground as if in hermetically sealed mausoleums. Some of it seems postmodern; some is as primitive as the silhouette made by crushing ochre into paste, holding it in the artist's mouth, and blowing spray over the splayed hand onto the surface. Such spread-fingered hands are found everywhere among primitive peoples, practiced by Aboriginal artists right up through the 20C, and emblazoned on the plucky little Pioneer spacecraft, the only human artifact to have escaped the Solar System. The hand, fingers spread, palm toward the viewer: from Cro-Magnon to Aborigine to Christ Pantokrater to Pioneer, it means, humanity was here, remember us.