Lost in Pre-History

Ever since my encounter with the Neanderthal museum in Germany, I’ve been digging through books on cave art.   I’m not sure whether my desire to escape into the past was partly motivated by our return - the first monitor I saw when I got off the plane in Chicago showed scenes of bloody marathon runners and bewildered bystanders.  Contemporary life didn’t look so appealing.

As soon as my jet lag calmed down enough so I could climb the suspended marble staircase at the Roseville Library (I refuse to use the elevator... there are few enough opportunities to climb in daily American life, and I am lucky enough to still be able to rely on my knees) and wandered through the Art History section looking for “cave art.”  I thought I was looking for images to stimulate my jewelry design.  I didn’t expect to get absorbed in pre-history. My last exposure to what archaeology had pieced together about the Pleistocene is terribly out-of-date. Not surprising.  I think my formal education on that topic stopped at age 11, so almost fifty years ago.  I also have a suspicion I might not have been paying too much attention to the vast segments of time discussed.  Perhaps when I was 11,  50 years and 50,000 didn’t seem so different.

One of the most amazing facts hit me yesterday.  Neanderthal humans existed on this earth essentially unchanged, with a stable hunter-gatherer culture, for 300,000 years.  We Homo Sapiens have only been around for 200,000.  And the change from hunting and gathering goes back only about 10,000 years. A few months ago, I went to see the touring Tut-Ankh-Amen exhibit, and was reminded that Ancient Egypt changed just incrementally over two thousand years.

A few days after the Boston attack, my sister-in-law called me to see how I was doing.  She called my cell and caught me in the library stacks, absorbed in tracing a line of 40,000 year-old red ochre dots in a photograph from a French cave.  I had to think for a minute what she was talking about.  I am not proud of this fact.  I admitted to her that one of my self-care strategies in times of crises is to stay far away from the TV and get all my news in written form.  And then I added: “ I’m busy escaping contemporary culture by studying paleolithic art.”  This doesn’t mean I don’t care.  It’s precisely because I do care, and there is nothing I can do, that I’m trying to take the very long view.  Another sobering fact: during one of the coldest glacial periods the total human population in Europe was down to 20,000 humans.  We almost didn’t make it.  

Megaloceros with line of black dots from Lascaux