Talk:Cro-Magnon

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: In this discussion all editors agree that the current title is not appropriate. However, there is disagreement over which title is the most appropriate; some editors argue for "European early modern humans", while others argue for "Cro-Magnon".

In this discussion each option had roughly equal support, but consensus is not determined by counting !votes but by assessing the quality of the arguments given on the various sides of an issue, as viewed through the lens of Wikipedia policy.

Here, editors in support of "Cro-Magnon" presented the strongest evidence; while both sides presented ngrams in support of their position, editors in support of "European early modern humans" forgot to search for "Cro-Magnon" (as opposed to just "Cro Magnon"), which resulted in them significantly underestimating the usage of the title. This was further supported by the Google Scholar counts provided by Chhandama; while they didn't provide links which limited the ability to verify those numbers they were not contradicted by any editors.

As such, there is a rough consensus to move the article as proposed.

For the purpose of any appeal, if this was a true "no consensus" result I would have moved the article to "European early modern humans", as it is the option that is closest to the current title, being primarily a stylistic variation.

@SMcCandlish, Austronesier, and Joe: Taking off my closer hat to clarify a misunderstanding in this discussion about Ngrams. What Google Ngrams does is break books up into sequences of between one and five words, and store their cumulative frequency per year. This means that all it knows is the stored sequence; it cannot know anything else about that contents of the book, or even what book the sequence came from. As such, there is no way to search for books that include "Cro" but don't include "Magnon".

What searching for (African - American) does is subtract the yearly frequency of "African" from the yearly frequency of "American"; this is why the result is negative. BilledMammal (talk) 05:24, 25 November 2023 (UTC)

Early European modern humans → Cro-Magnon – Per WP:COMMONNAME. From what I can tell, the current article title ("Early European modern humans") is just a made-up term by Wikipedia. It doesn't even show up on the Google Ngrams. It would be much better to use a term that is actually used in reliable sources for this article's title. Rreagan007 (talk) 19:46, 2 November 2023 (UTC) — Relisting. BD2412 T 18:08, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

• Comment Looking at the abbreviation EEMH, "European early modern humans" is found in sources like this , more so than "early European modern humans" (which may explain why it seems like a Wikipedia invention). This article was moved from European early modern humans to the current title almost exactly 3 years ago (30 Oct 2020) by Chiswick Chap with the reason avoid confusion with Early Modern (e.g. Shakespeare's) period, also match lead section. Personally I disagree with this move, early modern human (EMH) is an established phrase and "European EMH" makes more sense grammatically than "early European modern human". I don't believe that confusion with the early modern period is as likely as asserted in the 2020 move (at least to people familiar with prehistoric humans). In summary, if this proposed move fails, we should seriously consider returning the article to its original title. BegbertBiggs (talk) 22:55, 2 November 2023 (UTC)
• Support: I tend to agree with the proposed move, though I would strongly suggest "Cro-Magnon" over "Cro-Magnons". I am not a fan of article titles in the plural, e.g. the unseemly Greeks instead of the more appropriate Greek (people). Eric ^talk 22:59, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

  @Eric: The Google Ngrams do seem to indicate that the singular form is more common, and as our general rule per WP:SINGULAR is to render article titles in the singular form, I have updated this nomination to the singular form as you have suggested. Rreagan007 (talk) 01:51, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• Support per WP:COMMONNAME. I even have a degree in anthropology, but would not have been certain that "early European modern humans" here was meant to be confined to "Cro-Magnons". My fall-back position would be to move it to European early modern humans, per BegbertBiggs.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:51, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
• Support. As discussed at some length in the last RM, the lack of google hits for "Early European modern human" is misleading, because the phrase used in scientific literature is "[European] early modern human". I think EMH is the more common name in recent specialist sources, but it looks like Cro-Magnon still has more popular recognition, and clearly the current title is causing unnecessary confusion. If there isn't consensus for Cro-Magnon (singular), then I agree with SMc that returning to European early modern human is the second best option. – Joe (talk) 09:11, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  The discussion below and especially this Ngram has persuaded me that a move to European early modern human is better. It seems to have been the common name for quite some time, and matches the parent article at early modern human. – Joe (talk) 14:58, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose I would prefer the modern designation European early modern human (EEMH). "Cro-Magnon" is a fairly tainted and misunderstood term (it just means "Cavemen" to most people). पाटलिपुत्र (Pataliputra) (talk) 10:43, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  Did you see where that redirect (which you set up in 2019) actually went until I changed it just now? Crazy bots - talk about Artificial Lack of Intelligence. Johnbod (talk) 16:32, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  I don't see the term as tainted. And even if "most people" equate Cro-Magnon to "caveman" (maybe 40 years ago but I'll wager the term is now not in most people's vocabulary), I think an encyclopedia would do better to dispel any such misconceptions rather than to cater to them. Eric ^talk 14:08, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose this proposal, but support a move. If used, the well-established EMH term should be kept together, so European early modern human is better than the current title. I'm inclined to prefer that, which will probably increasingly become the norm. It also makes the pile-up crash of adjectives slightly less confusing and ugly, imo. Second choice "Cro-Magnon". But, contrary to what the nom claims it is easy to find RS using the current title (in the singular mostly). Johnbod (talk) 16:32, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
• Move to European early modern human per above. I've never heard of this "Cro-Magnons" concept, and while it might be known to experts in the field, Wikipedia naming should be based on WP:RECOGNIZEability. As a descriptive noun it doesn't have to conform exactly to established ngram terms, but should describe the topic succinctly and accurately, which it does. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 20:07, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  Really? It's a common insult in Europe to call someone a Cromagnon and the people using it are anything but experts. Killuminator (talk) 22:09, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  Really? I don't think it appears in the Dominic Cummings Dictionary of Insulting Terms, and that's pretty comprehensive. Johnbod (talk) 03:16, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

  But note List of Captain Haddock's Curses § C. Ham II (talk) 10:09, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

• Move to European early modern humans per above. In Google Scholar, this order prevails over the one in the current title. "Cro-Magnon" clearly has fallen out of use in specialist literature ever since more (and older) anatomically modern humans have been excavated all over the world. It may still linger in popular literature, but its recognizability is based on the misconception that the Cro-Magnon indivdual is the oldest known European early modern human. We shouldn't perpetuate it. –Austronesier (talk) 21:19, 3 November 2023 (UTC)

  Could live with that as a second choice, but "do what the most recent specialist literture prefers" is not a Wikipedia article titles criterion of any kind. It would certainly be better than the mangled phrase "early European modern humans", but it fails WP:COMMONNAME, even when confined to modern (like last 20 years or so) source material, by a very, very wide margin .  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  07:14, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

  I think the correct search is, "Cro-Magnon" gives hits for books containing "Cro" but not "Magnon". But in any case, you're right, "Cro-Magnon" has a much higher text frequency than the more "technical" titles. But note that some of the books specifically talk about the Cro-Magnon site or the individual excavated there, while others of them use the term in a representative manner for early modern humans. Another stumbling block for a move to the popular term "Cro-Magnon" is that many of the latter sources do not restrict the term to European early modern humans, but apply it to early modern humans in general (sometimes with a restriction to out-of-Africa specimen). This corresponds with my reception of the term when I started to read popular books about the topic in the 80s. –Austronesier (talk) 10:26, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

  Or this might be fairer, because Cro-Magnon used to refer to all EMH, not just those from Europe. That suggests early modern human displaced Cro-Magnon as the most common term in the mid-nineties. – Joe (talk) 14:56, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

  That doesn't seem to be provable with this tool, because "Cro Magnon" search term doesn't match "Cro-Magnon" in the source material (by far the most common spelling), but, if Austronesier were correct, "Cro-Magnon" as a search term would be mis-parsed as "Cro minus Magnon" in the data, which would just be wrong data handling. However, that "minus" parsing is not actually the case.This looks completely correct to me, with "Cro-Magnon" dwarfing the arguable misspelling "Cro Magnon", in turn being more common than the disused technical phrases. When Google Ngrams says "Replaced Cro-Magnon with [Cro - Magnon] to match how we processed the books", that does not indicate "Cro minus Magnon". The docs here say that square brackets force off treatment of an operator character as an operator and force treament as a regular string character, and also says explicitly that "well-meaning will search for the phrase well-meaning; if you want to subtract meaning from well, use (well - meaning)", with round brackets. What happens with a string like Cro-Magnon is that the system breaks it into three strings, "Cro", "-", and "Magnon", puts a search-syntactically required but user-unfriendly space between them, and wraps the expression in square brackets to prevent "-" being treated as a math operator. It's easy to prove this is how it works by trying to use [Cro-Magnon] as a search string. It throws an error until you replace this with [Cro - Magnon] or Cro-Magnon which give results identical to each other (if you use both at once, you get a single line ). PS: The prescribed syntax for operator actions appears to be malfunctional, at least for non-numeric values. Using strings that are all real stand-alone words in English, the ability to get a result like "African minus American" doesn't work right, and often produces negative numbers . This failure seems to happen most of the time that such a construction is paired with any other search term at all. I can sometimes get it to produce a positive, but one which does not align with the first part of the search string minus the cases that contain the second part of the search string when you separate those seraches. That is to say, the "(Foo - Bar)" syntax produces completely untrustable results, even when used by itself and compared to other searches using the same strings, and even when it doesn't produce negatives in the first place. But the results for "[Foo - Bar]" are consistently identical to those for "Foo-Bar", and when used with strings of roughly understood usage frequency, they align with the predicted results (e.g. "African American" is a more common string than hyphenated "African-American", and "African" by itself is obviously more common than either, and the ngram shows these results correctly ).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:02, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

• Support per @SMcCandlish. Easily recognizable term even if for the wrong reasons. Killuminator (talk) 22:11, 3 November 2023 (UTC)
• Support. Chiswick Chap was right about the confusing connotations of "early modern" in European early modern humans, which many here are suggesting; see where that first link redirects. Cro-Magnon avoids that ambiguity, and while there is another ambiguity with the place name, this would be the WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for that term (as with Neanderthal and Neanderthal (valley)). Ham II (talk) 10:09, 4 November 2023 (UTC)

  Really? Can you give an example of a context in which someone would write "early modern humans", referring to the early modern period? – Joe (talk) 15:02, 6 November 2023 (UTC)

• Move to Early European modern humans European early modern humans per पाटलिपुत्र, Johnbod and Austronesier. Krakkos (talk) 15:50, 5 November 2023 (UTC) Krakkos (talk) 19:02, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

Krakkos, that's the current title - we are supporting European early modern humans. A slip-up? Johnbod (talk) 17:07, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

It was indeed a slip-up, Johnbod. Thank your for the correction. Hope everything is well with you. Krakkos (talk) 19:02, 5 November 2023 (UTC)

• Comment As I mention above, I support a move to Cro-Magnon, and I'd like to float a further observation here. I think the intro sentence itself, as it currently reads, makes a case for this: Early European modern humans (EEMH), or Cro-Magnons, were the first early modern humans (Homo sapiens) to settle in Europe... This long statement of the obvious, in my view, straightaway provokes the question of why we have a separate article for EEMH (I'm not saying we shouldn't). But first, we already have the article Early modern human; second, the term "Cro-Magnon" has long been established as the shorthand for European EMH; and third, the WP entries in every European language use some form of "Cro-Magnon" as their title for this topic. I see the single-word title "Cro-Magnon", with an article defining the term as one used to designate late-Pleistocene Homo sapiens in Europe, as preferable to the comparatively ungainly, four-word construction "European early modern human". Eric ^talk 16:02, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
• Move to European early modern humans per above, move to Cro-Magnon as a secondary option. Happy editing, SilverTiger12 (talk) 23:17, 7 November 2023 (UTC)
• Support. Apart from other comments, we must consider Eric's points seriously for once. I argued in 2018 that we need the "Cro-Magnon" and still stand by it. I am quite baffled by comments like "'Cro-Magnon' is a fairly tainted and misunderstood term", "the well-established EMH term", and ""Cro-Magnon" clearly has fallen out of use in specialist literature". They are just not true; early European modern humans (eEhm) and European early modern humans (Eehm) are not the most popular terms or replacing Cro-Magnon in literature. Google Scholar hit since 2000 for Cro-Magnon is 14600, eEmh 53, Eehm 347, or just plain "early modern humans" 8940; or in the last decade only, Cro-Magnon is 7810. Fallen out of use? No. Cro-Magnon is a fitting name for the same reason we have Neanderthals (not "archaic European humans" or "German archaic humans"; they are not exclusive to Europe) or Denisovans (not "archaic Siberian humans"). Chhandama (talk) 06:01, 8 November 2023 (UTC)
• Support. The term "Cro-Magnon" is still common, and I agree that "European early modern humans", while probably a more accurate title to the sources, also sounds like it's discussing the Early modern period which is not accurate. I'd be willing to shrug and say "oh well" if the sources were strongly behind a potentially confusing term, but with usage split, better to use the clearer term IMO. SnowFire (talk) 23:01, 14 November 2023 (UTC)