Did you ever see our earliest ancestors smiling ?
Attempts to re-construct recognisable faces from bones,
fossils and data were always going to be tricky. But the faces scowl
informatively, as if suddenly startled by scientific intrusion. They rarely
smile, or betray and emotion we might link with.
And in our imagination, do our cave-dwelling ancestors sit
together and gaze at the moon ? Do they sing gently to wakeful children ? Do
they worry about what tomorrow might bring ? Do they hum enchanting melodies by
their fires or whistle a happy tune to embolden themselves in some deep and
scary forest ?
We might just be underestimating their intellectual and
emotional capacity. While they lacked knowledge of so much that we take for
granted, they were capable of the same sort of emotions as we are. If we
survive even 200 more years a species, our cutting-edge knowledge will look
crude to those who come after us. But
they should not underestimate our capacity for poetry, care, empathy and grief.
And occasionally we freeze in time. We become a confusing
still from a movie. And the freezing baffles communication. When Pioneer was
launched it carried a plaque to explain to intelligent life out there
who we were, who had sent the spacecraft. This is it:
Things were simpler then with only two genders. Today the
plaque would need to be right down the side of the space-craft. The raised arm
was to indicate that we had articulated bodies, and the figures show our size
relative to the capsule. It also maps some astronomical scientific information,
and gives the state of our knowledge at the time of the launch. It’s hard to
know what intelligent alien life would make of this.
Kurt Vonnegut imagined an alien on the earth. He was
super-intelligent, and carried a vital message. But Vonnegut’s alien could
communicate only through a combination of farting and tap-dancing. Someone
brained him with a golf-club.
This cave painting reaches across time, and touches our
imagination. The artist or artists painted this about 40 000 years ago.
Why ? Maybe because s/he had just discovered that you could
blow paint through a hollowed bone, and the spray was interesting. Maybe
because s/he wanted to record all the people in the caves, and have them smile
as they walked past.
There is not just one hand here. There are large and small
hands, both left and right hands, women’s hands and men’s hands. This was a
group painting, a Neolithic selfie on a huge scale. Where you see a hand,
someone stretched out their fingers on the rock and waited for the cold paint
to be blown on the back. Imagine the delight of lifting their hand tentatively
away, only to see the shape on the rock, outlined in paint.
They must have laughed, talked about the process. Wondered whether
the artist who had the idea was nuts or some kind of crazy person.
None of them will have thought that their hands would be so
affecting 40 000 years later across unimaginable oceans of rolling time.
But there is still something immediate, joyfully random,
wonderfully gratuitous about the image they created. It reaches out to us, to
our imaginations, and is very direct.
Frozen in time, the humanity of the image sings a song we
all know.
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