Barbara Ehrenreich - The Humanoid Stain: Art lessons from our cave-dwelling ancestors
IN 1940, FOUR TEENAGE
BOYS stumbled, almost literally, from German-occupied France into the
Paleolithic Age. As the story goes, and there are many versions of it, they had
been taking a walk in the woods near the town of Montignac when the dog
accompanying them suddenly disappeared. A quick search revealed that their
animal companion had fallen into a hole in the ground, so - in the spirit of
Tintin, with whom they were probably familiar - the boys made the perilous
fifty-foot descent down to find it.
They found the dog and much more, especially
on return visits illuminated with paraffin lamps. The hole led to a cave, the
walls and ceilings of which were covered with brightly colored paintings of
animals unknown to the twentieth-century Dordogne - bison, aurochs, and lions.
One of the boys, an apprentice mechanic, later reported that, stunned and
elated, they began to dart around the cave like “a band of savages doing a war
dance.” Another recalled that the painted animals in the flickering light of
the boys’ lamps also seemed to be moving. “We were completely crazy,” yet
another said, although the build-up of carbon dioxide in a poorly ventilated
cave may have had something to do with that.
This was the famous
and touristically magnetic Lascaux cave, which eventually had to be closed to
visitors lest their exhalations spoil the artwork. Today, almost a century
later, we know that Lascaux is part of a global phenomenon, originally referred
to as “decorated caves.” They have been found on every continent except
Antarctica - at least 350 of them in Europe alone, thanks to the cave-rich
Pyrenees - with the most recent discoveries in Borneo (2018) and the Balkans
(April 2019).
Uncannily, given the distances that separate them, all these caves
are adorned with similar “decorations”: handprints or stencils of human hands,
abstract designs containing dots and crosshatched lines, and large animals,
both carnivores and herbivores, most of them now extinct. Not all of these
images appear in each of the decorated caves—some feature only handprints or
megafauna. Scholars of paleoarcheology infer that the paintings were made by
our distant ancestors, although the caves contain no depictions of humans doing
any kind of painting. There are human-like
creatures, though, or what some archeologists cautiously call “humanoids,”
referring to the bipedal stick figures that can sometimes be found on the
margins of the panels containing animal shapes... https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-humanoid-stain-ehrenreich
