European early modern humans

European early modern humans is a general term for pre-modern early modern humans (early Homo sapiens sapiens) of the European Upper Paleolithic. The term is largely interchangeable with Cro-Magnon as commonly understood, but while the latter is used somewhat vaguely to address the people associated with a number of archaeological phases that make up the Upper Paleolithic rather than any anatomically modern Palaeolithic human remains from Europe, the term European early modern humans has largely supplanted it in scientific use. The two terms also differ somewhat in composition.

A number of finds in Europe are referable to early modern humans. These include the classical Cro-Magnon 1 and other skeletons found at the site, as well as the Grimaldi find from the rock shelters around the "Balzi Rossi" (the Red Cliff) near Ventimiglia in Italy. The oldest known finds of anatomically modern (as opposed to Neanderthals) are from Peștera cu Oase (the bones cave) near the Iron Gates in Romania, dated to at least 37,800 years old. The find combines a variety of archaic, derived early modern, and possibly Neanderthal features, however the modern attributes place it close to European early modern humans among samples. Genetic work on the Siberian finds that group with the early modern Europeans indicate the earliest modern people in Europe had a larger unbroken share of Neanderthal DNA than do modern peoples.

The term "early" when applied to modern European finds is usually restricted to finds from earlier than the Mesolithic, ending about 10,000 years ago. This coincides with the end of the last ice age, which also saw the end of the ice age megafauna. At this point the human population of the world switched from a culture of big game hunting to smaller game and later an early storage culture of grass seeds. With less demands for brute strength, people all over the world became less robust, resulting in the comparatively more gracile population of today. Thus, the early European modern humans are the big-game, more robustly built Ice-Age sample as opposed to the more gracile post-glacial (gracile) populations. The process leading to the development of smaller and more fine-boned humans seems to have begun at least 50,000–30,000 years ago.

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