Cro–Magnon Man, who emerged around 37,000 years ago and disappeared at the end of the Last Ice Age. He is often described as having a dome-shaped cranium and broad forehead and a brain capacity of 1,600 cc, which is greater than modern man. His skull has thick eyebrow projections and a bony protrusion at the back that is characteristic of both Neanderthal man and Homo erectus. Blavatsky^(c), Sepehr^(d) along with a number of investigators^(e) have suggested that they may have been the original Atlanteans. They have pointed to the physical traits listed above together with blood grouping and linguistic similarities to be found in the same regions of Western Europe and North Africa.

Robert John Langdon also claims that “Cro-Magnon/Atlanteans colonised America” based on a study of blood group distribution^(b). R. Cedric Leonard is another supporter of the idea of Cro-Magnons in America^(h), citing the work of Dennis Stanford & the late Bruce Bradley ^[1516]. Leonard offered a more complex view of Cro-Magnons on his now-closed website, but excerpts are available elsewhere^(j).

Physical anthropology has identified the modern remnants of Cro-Magnon Man in the Berbers and Tuaregs of North Africa, the Basques of Northern Spain together with small population pockets in the Dordogne Valley and Brittany in France. The highest incidence of Rhesus-negative blood in the world is to be found among the Basques. Similar high levels of Rhesus-negative blood are to be found among the inhabitants of the Canaries and the Atlas Mountains of Morocco; areas where Cro-Magnons lived. This fact is seen as evidence for claiming that the Basques are directly descended from Cro-Magnon Man.

On the basis of skull shape, William Howells^[268] and Bertil Lundman^[269] have supported this view. The regions that were home to Cro-Magnon Man, in Upper Paleolithic times, were comparable with those occupied by their latter-day successors such as the now-extinct Guanches of the Canaries and the Basques.

R. Cedric Leonard is probably the best-known modern proponent of the Atlantean Cro-Magnon idea^(f), he refers to the work of Oliviera Martins^[270], who in the 1930s, pointed out that many of the Cro-Magnon people have given themselves distinguishing names with the suffix ’tani’ from the Mauritani of North Africa to the Bretani of Brittany and Britain. Leonard also insists that an analysis of the languages of these groups of people points to a relationship with each other while being quite different from the other languages of Europe or the Near East. He thinks that it is quite possible that these ancient languages date back to the cultures of the Ice Age. Leonard also refers to what he calls “an anomalous Cro-Magnon/Atlantis outpost” in northern Palestine^(a).

Alexander Marshack (1918-2004) was an American journalist turned archaeologist, who, in the 1970s, offered evidence^[1633] that markings on a number of bones from the Upper Paleolithic were used as lunar calendars to mark the passage of time. Similar markings have been identified on the painted walls of the famous Cro-Magnon Lascaux caves in France^(g).

At the Paleolithic site at Little Salt Spring in Florida an antler incised with 28 notches was reported in 2011⁽ⁱ⁾. Commenting on this, Caleb Everett has proposed ^[1776.30] that “In fact, the marks suggest that this piece of antler is the oldest known New World artifact used for calendrical purposes.” If confirmed, it will go some way towards vindicating the much-criticised theories of Marshack!

This combination of date, geographical spread, language and physical similarities offers a reasonable basis for postulating the idea of a coherent civilisation along the European and North African Atlantic seaboards and in the Atlantic itself, at the end of the last Ice Age that could be accommodated by one interpretation of Plato’s Atlantis. Lewis Spence was a supporter of this possibility.

Jason Colavito has unearthed late 19th-century attempts to link the Cro-Magnons with the Nephilim of the Bible^(k).

Johan Nygren believes that Cro-Magnon man lived in Atlantis(c), which he claims had existed in the vicinity of Iceland^(l), he also drew attention to the similarities between Greenland and the 17th-century map of Atlantis offered by Athanasius Kircher^(m).

The possibility of a Cro-Magnon connection with Atlantis has inspired an American writer, Ernest Warner, to produce a number of novels based on this concept starting with The Cro-Magnon Archipelago: Atlantis Reborn, in 2021.

^(a) https://www.atlantisquest.com/Outpost.html (offline March 2018) See Archive 2260

^(b) The Post Glacial Flooding Hypothesis: Cro-Magnon/Atlanteans colonised America (archive.org)

^(c) Cro Magnon Man And Atlantis – blavatsky.net (archive.org) 

^(d) https://atlanteangardens.blogspot.ie/2014/04/the-cro-magnon-invasions.html

^(e) https://differentpast.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/cro-magnon-and-atlantis/

^(f) https://atlantisforschung.de/index.php?title=Atlantis_und_der_Cro-Magnon-Mensch

^(g) https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/975360.stm

^(h) https://web.archive.org/web/20161126063206/https://www.atlantisquest.com/America.html

⁽ⁱ⁾ Budget Cuts Close Florida’s Little Salt Spring – Archaeology Magazine (link broken) *

^(j) new illuminati: Atlantis and Cro-Magnon Man (nexusilluminati.blogspot.com) 

^(k) An Early Argument that Cro-Magnons Were the Nephilim – JASON COLAVITO 

^(l) https://steemit.com/atlantis/@johan-nygren/iceland-as-atlantis-2-0 

^(m) https://steemit.com/geography/@johan-nygren/atlas-the-titan-the-atlas-vertebrae-and-atlantis-as-the-continent-that-carries-the-sky-or-the-earth