Link to article (guardian.com, archive.org)
The aurochs, the mammoth and the steppe bison are long extinct, but their painted likenesses still look relatively fresh across the walls and roofs of Altamira.
My own interest in cave art had been growing as I got older and glummer. The earliest expressions of human civilisation seemed to gain relevance, and poignancy, the closer we were coming to the end of it. I had a general dread of the future, coupled with the maudlin apprehensions of a man in midlife. Online chatter informed me that men of this vintage spend inordinate portions of their day thinking about the Roman empire, but that period was too late for my liking. I looked to deep time and subterranean space for consolation.
Contemplating the oldest human art, [Barbara Ehrenreich] observed that animals were often represented with reverential detail, while human forms hardly featured on cave walls, and looked like hapless stick figures when they did: cartoons confused by their own erections. Regarding their place in the food chain, the painters could not be said to take this species very seriously. “They were meat,” wrote Ehrenreich, “and they also seemed to know that they knew they were meat – meat that could think. And that, if you think about it long enough, is almost funny.”
We don’t see ourselves that way any more, Ehrenreich concluded. We have lost that ability to laugh at ourselves. “And I strongly suspect that we will not survive the mass extinction we have prepared for ourselves, unless we too finally get the joke.” This also sounded right to me when I read it.
“I don’t think the first Homo sapiens would have any expectations of us, or, let’s say, anticipations,” [Ran] Barkai said. “But I do believe we have made more mistakes than they did. We lost the connection they had to this world. They led the way quite nicely and successfully, and we got … distracted. We took another path, which is now leading us to a dead end, maybe.” He believed early Homo sapiens had it better than we do. “It was a picnic for them,” he said.
After what felt like half an hour or so of constant motion, I checked my watch to see that it had been about nine minutes. [Diego] Garate said he never got used to the temporal disruptions of spelunking. A busy day in the dark could feel like a full working week; a night bivouacked in the belly of a mountain might pass like a siesta.