Paleolithic Art, pt. 5

January 27, 2007

The fifth chapter.. "The Art of Hunting Large Mammals".. lays out the forces that combined to make us who we are as human beings. For Guthrie our stand-out traits go back to a specific lifeway that human beings followed for thousands of years.. and which shaped our evolutionary development. We were round pegs in a round hole while following the hunting lifeway.

When I imagined the deep human past I never thought of it in terms of pleasure. In my mind the fun would not have started until human beings got together in something like a civilization.. and before that life was famously nasty, brutish, and short. Guthrie, however, gives a portrait of the human past that, while acknowledging hardships, recognizes the intensity of the pleasure that belonged to this lifeway. He writes:

Jubilation and poignant awareness of death can occur together, and we need to rekindle these emotions when we think about our human past. Such a long-running play, such a long success, means the Paleolithic hunting lifeway had to be deep fun.. [224-5]

That is to say, human emotional responses to the world followed closely the demands and rewards of the hunting lifeway. This was our passion for thousands of years.. our Super Bowl, our daily work, the subject of our stories, the goal of our education, and the reason for our deaths. All these emotions and tasks that in the modern world are split into multiple smaller channels once ran together in pursuit of a single goal: to bring down mammals.

I kept thinking about Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March as I read about this hunting lifeway.. Augie March kept revolving through job after job.. looking for a fate that fit him.. where he was a natural. Maybe this hunting lifeway is what Augie March was searching for? Finally all these restless things about us human beings makes sense. We were not born to sit in a box and push papers.. or to kill our souls in industrial repetition.. but to use all our creativity and ingenuity to track and kill smart and dangerous animals.

Making their way in this ancient world.. which involved killing large animals without the help of guns.. meant special attention to rearing quality offspring:

Paleolithic children had to have spent a long apprenticeship in a wide range of disciplines. Quality education mattered here; the evidence of that story forms the spine of this book. The radically new thing about the Pleistocene band may have been its carefully nurtured children with years of rich and intimate experiences, able to achieve new plateaus of individual and social complexity. [251]

Although it may sound strange, I have read nothing more insightful on parenting (a task I am just beginning to think about) than this book about the earliest human beings. The importance of play and fun learning seem obvious.. and creativity is something that comes naturally to a child that is allowed to expand at her own pace. This need for quality children appears also to have been the reason that human beings developed such strong male-female bonding.. it was an evolutionary strategy for bringing up the kind of children who could succeed following this hunting lifeway. These were children that needed the long-term nurture of a couple. Emily and I could do worse as parents than to constantly ask ourselves what will bring us closest to the Paleolithic norms that shaped us.