Queen of Swords

This was one of the clues in the crossword which we all do in the chat room on Thursday night, US time. Doubting Didymus, Defiant_Heretic, Jeremy and lpetrich were in the chat room and I was confident that they would be able to solve this evolutionary teaser. Homo habilis and Homo ergaster were proposed, but they didn't fit the spaces; luckily one of the letters was already provided by another clue, giving us

_ _ _ _ _ _ N

Soon afterwards, we got another letter, giving us

C _ _ _ _ _ N

"Could this be Cro-Magnon?" someone asked.
"That won't fit," I said.
"Maybe it's Chellean," lpetrich suggested. He manipulated it a little to fit the available spaces, producing Chellan, and someone else did a google search to see if Chellan was an alternate spelling.
"But if the answer's 'Chellan', then another clue going through it will be a problem," I said. "'The immature young of an insect' (5 letters) provides the third letter in the paleolithic human clue. What 5-letter insect young has E in it?"
There were only seven google hits for Chellan. Defiant_Heretic suggested that perhaps the clue could refer to a specific fossil specimen, rather than to a group. I said that maybe it referred to a character in Clan of the Cave Bear. Finally we moved on to other clues, which provided a third letter,

C _ _ _ M _ N

"It still isn't Cro-Magnon, guys."
"Could it be C. Magnon?"
"Even that won't fit. Let's try another one."

The other one gave us an L for the start of the insect young clue, making that one "larva". And that provided a fourth letter for "Primitive humans of the Paleolithic era", which was all we needed.

C _ V _ M _ N

I'll leave it to you to guess our reactions.

Valentine Pontifex

Sometimes knowing a lot of fancy words (well not fancy to us in this forum but fancy to the average Joe) can have its disadvantages. We see Paleolithic and we try to think
of scientific terms and not spend nearly as much time looking not-so-accurate words form the vernacular.

Of course the crossword writer might not even know what Homo ergaster even is. :-)

Spaz

Haha, no big complicated words for that man.

scigirl

Ha ha!

That is too damn funny. I do that sometimes with crosswords - esp if they are medical terms.

sci

Doubting Didymus

I still can't believe it. When we got that 'V' I had to destroy something.

Defiant Heretic

We spent 28 minutes on that clue. (although we did do some others in that time while trying to find letters.)

lpetrich is the one who finally got it.

Peez

Even without technical terms, one can get caught in a line of thought when doing crosswords. My mother and brother were working for a while on a word (I cannot recall the clue), and already had:

_range

I could hear them talking about it, muttering things like "i-range" and "a-range." My brother left for a while, and when he came back he saw that my mother had written something in. "What's an o-range?" he asked, then turned red.

Peez