Adaptive Implications

Cave at Chauvet, Grotte Chauvet, not discovered until 1994, turned the study of prehistoric art upside down, too good, too representational, fabulous paintings. Using the scale that had been developed, should have been maybe 20,000 years old, but carbon from the pigment dated 33,000 years old. Good news is that the late discovery has meant the best ever excavation. A huge trove of stuff from the floor and buried, which, though it doesn't get us any closer as to why the paintings exist (the two current camps on this are art-for-art's sake, and hunting magic) but does tell us a great deal about Aurignacian life. An interest of mine since I read Alexander Marshack's "The Roots Of Civilization" in 1972, a great book especially for the time (we know a lot more now), that was called to my attention because he was searching for the cognitive beginnings of man's first art, symbol, and notation. I have to laugh: picture the scholar, reading the newest tome on Prehistoric Art, the book is propped safely elevated, held open by a rock, almost perfectly triangular, sandstone, rounded edges, an artifact maybe used for burnishing stiff pelts, to make them supple. I say 'safely elevated' because the scholar is eating a tomato sandwich (whole wheat, mayo, salt and pepper) with a sweet onion on the side, and he is dripping tomato juice from both sides of his mouth, onto a paper towel on a paper plate and the blotches look a lot like bison or mammoths. I'm in the Hunting Magic camp. There is seasonal information in some paintings, places where certain species might gather at certain times of the year. The best spot to get a caribou, 20,000 years ago, if you lived in France, was at a ford of the Seine, just north of where Paris would be. In the Fall, bring rain-gear. I think you need to have been a hunter (I no longer do) to understand, the over-rubbing of the lines is clearly an indication that the site was successful year after year. Marshack makes the point, shit, now I have to reread that book, at least I know where it is, I saw it just the other day, it's under my "Josephus", top middle shelf on the back side of the two-sided bookshelf wall to my right; over-sized, black jacket with silver letters, that time-factoring is the key. Yes it is, and I feel foolishly proud that I can find it, despite the wings and arrows thrown against me by upstarts with no life-experience, not the key, I can't find that, but, at least, the book. I'm staff at the museum tomorrow, which means I'm paid to read for four hours. I will exploit this to the hilt. The thing I do best is read. I can do a great many things, but reading is where I live. Nothing is real until I see a representation in my head; at least what I thought I saw. I only bother you with details because they're important. I don't like the imagined me, because he's so not me, something completely different.You and me babe.