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 My last exposure to what archaeology had pieced together about the Pleistocene is terribly out-of-date.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

Neanderthal

When I was 11, we went on a field trip to the Neanderthal.   It was a hot summer day, and our teacher intended to tire us out with a wholesome hike through the woods before taking us to the museum.  I remember two things:  dragging myself through the woods, thirsty and sweating, each of my limbs heavy with what I now suspect was the onset of hormone surges and a tiny white museum that was dull as dust.  So when my cousin Ike suggested the Neanderthal for our  traditional Sunday afternoon excursion, I was not expecting much.  Even after her husband, Bernie, informed me that the museum had been remodeled twice since I was there in 1965.  

I was blown away.  The museum had not only tripled in size, its displays had grown both awesome and awe-inspiring.  Now that we know Neanderthals mixed with Homo Sapiens ( Ron has just had his DNA tested through the National Geographic Genome Project - here’s the link in case you haven’t heard of it - and found out he has 3% Neanderthal DNA), they seem less like monsters and more like distant relatives.  Displays remind us of the time scale of human development and how rapid the shifts have been since humans settled down.  I loved a large suspended box with holes cut into the bottom that invited us to stick our heads up into the dark.  Once there, I was surrounded by shifting projections of cave paintings, punctuated by occasional images of camp fires.  Then there was a series of identical squares, each representing different dates from prehistory to the present.  Each square had individual figures proportional to population.  The Ice Age one had three people on it, and they stayed pretty sparse until the current one which had them packed in and hanging off the edge. 

Another lesson was political history - the shift from egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, to settled societies that grow more hierarchical as they grow more complex, and the idea that contemporary democracies are experiments trying to reintroduce egalitarian elements.  When I read 1491,  I first learned that Europeans,  used to rigid hierarchy, were amazed by the relatively egalitarian Native Americans they encountered, and took that paradigm shift home to serve as the germ of democracy.  Zing. Connection made.

After all that mental stimulation, we had to restore ourselves the traditional German Sunday afternoon way.  Coffee and cake at the restaurant next door. Mit Sahne - with whipped cream, of course.  The sun even cooperated.