Will Cuppy Tonight: "The Cro-Magnon Man" from "How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes"

The Cro-Magnons

"Even so recently as twenty or thirty years ago people knew hardly anything. For earlier data one has but to glance at the Family Album."

-- from tonight's installment

by Ken

We're nearing the end of our journey through the relations of Homo sapiens gathered in the opening section, "Memoirs of the Jukes Family, or Where We Come In," of How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes. Since the preface, we've met Java Man, Peking Man, and Piltdown Man, and Heidelberg Man, and Neanderthal Man. Tonight we meet --

The Cro-Magnon Man

THE CRO-MAGNONS were an old man, two young men, a woman and a child. The woman's brain was larger than the average man's. She had been killed with a blunt implement. The Cro-Magnons were very tall and had perfectly enormous fibulas like those in Chicago and Minneapolis, caused by chromosomes, genes, hormones and blastomeres. They were so wonderful that they were called Homo sapiens after us. They had Adam's apples. The Cro-Magnons were Upper Pleistocene and respectable. They invented Santa Claus, foreign missions, eggplant, punctuation, tatting and new methods of killing Neanderthals. They made rules preventing each other from doing what they did. We should love the Cro-Magnons because they were so smug.1 The Cro-Magnons were interested in art because of their unhappy home life which in turn was caused by their art. They would paint a Woolly Rhinoceros or a Paleolithic Bison in a cave when there was no one to stop them. Their favorite painting was called "A Yard of Paleolithic Bison." Their art was Independent and was finally arrested. It was Late Aurignacian because it was found in Early Solutrean deposits. The Cro-Magnons died out because they neglected sex.

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¹Perhaps we of today are inclined to overestimate the intellectual powers of the Cro-Magnons, who lived at least 25,000 years ago. As some of my readers may recall, even so recently as twenty or thirty years ago people knew hardly anything. For earlier data one has but to glance at the Family Album.

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TOMORROW IN WILL CUPPY TONIGHT: "The Modern Man (!)"


THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, JEAN SHEPHERD, and PERELMAN TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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