A: a product of human endeavor.

 

Seriously, look it up.

 

Or not, I don’t care. 

 

I’ve been reading what appears to be a textbook that magically appeared on a shelf in my bedroom “the origin and evolution of humans and humanness”.  Nobody admits to bringing it into the house.  It’s new to me, literally; a sticker on the back cover reads “New Book $36”.  A relative statement as the symposium that generated this textbook was held in 1992.

 

Tangent; I often get online driving directions that end in make a u-turn, and sure enough, I pass the road I need on the left and u-turn.  Yet when I revisit the site the u-turn directions do not recur and instead the left turn is indicated.

 

I sometimes wonder if I’m messing with myself from some future space/time/electro/magnetic unified field application or, if I’m insane.  Hard to know.

 

Anyhoo, one of the topics presented in this mysterious textbook is image making in the Upper Paleolithic by Margaret W. Conkey.  She is probably brilliant; hard to know.  After a longish introduction about why she isn’t calling cave art “cave art”, her text really starts to bore.  Then I get to her first image, and the next and next and she is redeemed.

 

By the time I get to a negative hand silhouette I am overcome.  The clown that left it reaches out from dusty antiquity to touch me like a brother and the weight of humanity crushes me as I contemplate human endeavor.

 

 

 

Positive and negative hand silhouettes of Gravettian period

 

 

Apparently, handprints occur all over the world in many different areas and cultures.  Check out http://www.uf.uni-erlangen.de/chauvet/chauvet.html if you would like to learn something about the symbols left by our Upper Paleolithic kin.