Somehow, without anyone intending it to, the idea that we do know what these cave symbols mean has permeated modern society. You think you’re smart, do you? Then what does this mean? ![]() ![]() Were our ancestors just playing, with a child’s hesitancy, at the perilous game of turning bits of pigment into an abstract form beyond space and time? Or had they, long before we realized, found a way to make dead objects speak? This is what I’ll ask James Damore, pressing his face into the cold rock, shouting with an increased frenzy that echoes shrilly in the sacred dome, spittle flying in mad rage as I scream. Is this writing? Is it language? Clearly it has to mean or do something these enigmas must have been put there for some kind of a reason. More complex pectiform shapes, combs with one extended tooth, branching combs that can start to look like Chinese characters or even human shapes, oscillating in the dark somewhere between abstraction and image. These patterns, and ones like them, recur across the cave, and they’re echoed in other caves across Europe and across the world. Surrounding the fish, overlapping it at points, are patterns. But I want to draw my prisoner’s attention to something else. The Cueva de la Pileta has plenty of these it’s noted for its masterly depiction of a large, snub-nosed, angry-looking fish. Most people are aware of the fantastic animal paintings that our stone age ancestors made - the herds of flowing bison, the horses that rear up in shimmering patterns across slabs of solid rock, the creatures overlapping each other in fluid cacophonies without ground lines or settings until they look less like representations of objects within our world and more like the snorting stinking chaos of the infinite. The people who lived in this cave 20,000 years ago, people who lived lives it’s impossible for us to even imagine, are still trying to talk to us. They left their millstones and their axe-heads they left walls blackened with soot from fires that went out eons ago, leaving traces across a chasm of time that could swallow up the entirety of recorded history four times over. We know that there were people here, some 20,000 years ago. ![]() There, we’ll push him into one of its huge, damp, cool cathedral-halls of fractured rock, where the darkness and the vastness of empty space seem to press themselves tightly against your skin, close and clawed and ancient. Plenty of caves would do, but let’s take him to the Cueva de la Pileta in Andalucia, Spain. Grab Damore by the scruff of his awful crew-neck white T-shirt, pull his twitching dangling body up the scrub and rocks of some remote hillside, and into the cave. ![]() I felt it most of all a few weeks ago, reading a blithe little jab in the now-infamous Google memo, in which the subsequently fired engineer James Damore remarks of the gender differences that apparently make women unable to properly use the computer that “they’re exactly what we would predict from an evolutionary psychology perspective.” To the cave, take him to the cave. I feel it when I read about diets or workouts that are supposed to replicate the diets and experiences of healthy peak-performance prehistoric humanity. The urge grabs me suddenly - in the middle of a conversation, for instance, when someone airily remarks that humans are just naturally competitive, or starts talking about social dynamics in terms of mate selection and maximum utility, or sometimes when they just say that words have meanings. Every so often, I get the urge to drag someone into a cave, and show them something unspeakable.
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