"........what if the Altamira cave paintings depict not only our past but also our future?"

Via Western Writers Shooters Association

I recall when I was small
How I spent my days alone
The busy world was not for me
So I went and found my own
I would climb the garden wall
With a candle in my hand
I'd hide inside a hole of rock and sand

On the stone an ancient hand
In a faded yellow-green
Made alive a worldly wonder
Often told but never seen
Now and ever bound to labor
On the sea and in the sky
Every man and beast appeared
A friend as real as I

CHORUS:
Before the fall
When they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn't even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me, and we understood

Can it be this sad design
Could be the very same
A woolly man without a face
And a beast without a name
Nothin' here but history
Can you see what has been done
Memory rush over me
Now I step into the sun

CHORUS

(Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, "The Caves of Altamira")

Many speak of "the writing on the wall" in the sense of a harbinger, warning those with wit enough to read it of dire things to come. But in Steely Dan's opus quoted above, what the discoverer of the cave paintings is viewing is not what's to come but what's already passed: an epoch in history whose denizens suffered a crude and brutal existence.

It's difficult to put ourselves, imaginatively, in the place of the cave painters, but when we succeed, we can't help but be aware of the enormous gulf between them and us of the 21st Century:

• No technology.
• No entertainment.
• No means of communication other than the human voice.
• No medicine.
• Caves their only shelter from the elements.
• Very limited food supply.
• Probable death in the mid-thirties.

Clearly, the life of the Cro-Magnon was no picnic. We present-day softies would fare poorly under those conditions. The hell with the time-machine project; let's see if there's a Real Housewives of New Jersey rerun on the idiot box.

But

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