Cave Men

In G.K. Chestertons book, The Everlasting Man, he points out something that even me with my puny brain have often wondered about--those fanciful stories "scientist" tell about the life of early man. We have all heard it on the radio, read about it in our school text books, watched it played out on the stage of the discovery channel: a hairy man with a slanted forehead beating a dirty hairy woman (ussually played by an underwear model or generic super model with a few patches of hair glued here and there to make her look primitive)and draging her off to his cave. You'd never guess, Chesterton says, that this rich tale was built upon a fragment of skull or a chunk of leg bone. When we actually look in the caves, we find not a neat row of female skulls with signs of head trauma but instead, expressive cave paintings--art. His point: the material evidence doesn't back up the cave-man-with-a-club theory, it actually shows that "primative" man had the gift of the spirit, that which drives men to paint and show reverence for the natural world. When we look in the tombs of our most distant ancestors, we do not find evidence of dull brutes, rather, we find men very much like ourselves.

I stumbled upon some bird watchers on a path through the wetlands on a recent day hike. They had thier binoculars out looking for birds, I was enjoying the way the shadows were playing in the branches of the low trees. If I lived in a cave, I would paint that couple of birdwatchers under the trees on my cave wall.

CAVE is to PAINTING as INTERNET is to ???