The Guardian had two pieces on cave art in the last two days. One reports on the discovery in Indonesia of figurative art twice as old as any yet known. Can you believe this giant animal being harangued by tiny human figures, as well as therianthropes (mixing human and animal features), is 44,000 years old? That makes the 12,000 years of the Holocene, whose end we've been hastening, seem a mere afternoon! The other, appearing today, is an essay by Barbara Ehrenreich trying to make sense of the absence or insignificance of human forms in decorated cave around the world. Noting that most of the animals depicted were megafauna now extinct (yes, we did that), she observes:
The marginality of human figures in cave paintings suggests that, at
least from a human point of view, the central drama of the Paleolithic
went on between the various megafauna – carnivores and large herbivores.
So depleted of megafauna is our own world that it is hard to imagine
how thick on the ground large mammals once were.
Turns out the animals depicted on cave walls (like this one at Lascaux) weren't the ones ancient humans (and Neanderthals) were able to kill and ate; we were more vulnerable to megafauna than they to us. Pushing back at interpretations of cave art as necessarily magical or religious, as well as that it shows the triumph of humans over other animals in the hunt, she suggests that it may also contain play and humor (like the Cueva de los Manos in Argentina, bottom), and builds from that toward a conclusion at once amusing and a warning:
Our Paleolithic ancestors ... knew where they stood in the scheme of things, which was not very
high, and this seems to have made them laugh. I strongly suspect that we
will not survive the mass extinction we have prepared for ourselves
unless we too finally get the joke.
I'm not sure we can imagine not being the dominant species (well, non-bacterial species) on the planet. Though folks in the Sundarbans genuinely fear the Bengal tiger, to an urban American like me (or the gents in suits in Altamira, above) rhinos and whales, like ancient redwood trees, seem the vulnerable ones. Like flies to wanton boys are they to us, we kill them for our sport - and even more by accident.
Assorted tables have been turned since Yahweh silenced Job by rhapsodizing about the megafauna Behemoth and Leviathan. (Yes, I have Job on my mind again, as next semester's "Book of Job and the Arts" approaches.) We become impatient at the attention lavished on these ungainly also-rans, knowing their very size marks them for extinction. It makes God seem quaintly out of touch too. But perhaps there's a way back in through Ehrenreich's musings? What if Job's final words were spoken laughing? Perhaps Job contains a memory of an earlier time when humans jestingly but also seriously reminded each other of their middling place in the foodchain. Hang with us, the Book of Job may be telling us, not with Behemoth, the first of the works of God (40:19).
