All times seem to those within them uniquely miserable. Even supposedly halcyon historical moments were horrible if you had to live through them: the eighteen-nineties in London, which now seem a time of wit and Café Royal luxury, were mostly seen then as decadent, if you were no fan of Oscar Wilde’s, or as dark and disgraceful, if you were. The allegedly placid American nineteen-fifties were regarded, at the time, as a decade of frightening conformity and approaching apocalypse.
But this does not mean that some moments can’t be uniquely miserable. Ours surely is, with the recent collapse of progressive Britain following on the constitutional crisis of liberal America, with so many people around the world caught between political polarities, and with the planet warming daily. No one has ever improved on Yeats’s expression of indignation after the Great War: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity; though in our time the best often share the passionate intensity but can’t be heard, because the worst have a smartphone with a Twitter app.
In the midst of such unease, we tend to seek out moments of cheer or just consolation, and suddenly we have found one, in a cave. The cave is in Indonesia—the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, on the island of Sulawesi, to be precise—and it was occupied, according to recent findings, more than forty thousand years ago, by early modern humans. Inside it for all that time has been a fourteen-and-a-half-foot-wide image, painted in dark-red pigment, depicting about eight tiny bipedal figures, bearing what look to be spears and ropes, bravely hunting the local wild pigs and buffalo. The discoverers of its antiquity, a team of archeologists at Griffith University, in Australia, including Maxime Aubert, the chief author of an article about the painting in Nature, call it “to our knowledge, currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.”
The very first storytelling picture! The first narrative, and it tells one of the simplest and most resonant stories we have: a tale of the hunter and the hunted, of small and easily mocked pursuers trying to bring down a scary but vulnerable beast. What’s more, the hunters appear to be what people whose business it is to decipher cave paintings call therianthropes, humans with animal elements, like heads. These eight, then, are the earliest known examples of this mysteriously durable manner of mythical depiction, which runs forward to Egyptian wall paintings and, for that matter, to modern animation. Therianthropes, it seems, reflect the symbolic practice of giving to humans the powers of animals, a shamanistic rite that seems tied to the origins of religion, and here it is, for the first time, a startup.
The detailed resolution of the images in the Nature article is at first disappointing. Though the buffalo, called anoa, are distinct enough, one of the human figures, we’re told, has “a tapering profile that possibly merges into the base of a thick tail and with short, curved limbs splayed out to the side. In our opinion, this part of the body resembles the lower half of a lizard or crocodile. It is thus possible that [the therianthrope] represents a composite of at least three different kinds of animals: a human, an anoa and a quadrupedal reptile.” To this chimerical composite, one might add the trained eye of an Australian archeologist, which seems necessary to ascertain the full effect.
And yet it’s impossible not to feel a shudder of communion with these ancient beings, recounting their hopeful stories of abundance in a time that was, certainly, even more unstable than our own. (We worry daily about the next good leader; they worried daily about the next good meal.) Nor would the storytelling have been the product of a merely male hierarchy of hunting. The patriarchy had little place in caves. A study sponsored by the National Geographic Society in 2013 suggests that three-quarters of the hand stencils found on the walls of dozens of European caves were made by women, and that the paintings alongside them likely were as well. Early man may have thrown the spears, but early woman made the pictures telling how.
Significant scientific discoveries do two things at once: advance the narrow field of fact and extend the imaginative field of wonder. Thinking of those images unspooling in the dark of a cave brings to mind many metaphors, among them intimations of modern movies. Indeed, the cave painting could be entered as evidence into a key aesthetic and storytelling argument of today—the debate between the paladins of American film, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and their Marvel Cinematic Universe contemporaries. Scorsese recently wrote, in the Times, that the superhero genre, whatever charms it may have, is degrading cinema by pulling it away from the real world of ambiguity, from the “complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” Coppola agreed, telling reporters that the Marvel-franchise movies are “despicable” for failing to supply their audience with “some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration.”
Yet our oldest picture story seems to belong, whether we want it to or not, more to the Marvel universe than to Marty Scorsese’s. The therianthropes, with their composite identities, are really the first superheroes, X-Men united on the wall for a fight. A human with the strength of a bull! Another with the guile of a crocodile! Perhaps the deeper truth is that Scorsese and Coppola are right, in that it takes a huge effort of the disciplined imagination to turn human attention away from daydreams of magical powers to the truth of our contradictory natures. Still, there is no denying our collective relief when the therianthropes arrive to save the day.
Our oldest stories are like our newest; we look for explanation and hope for a happy ending. People, then and now, tell tales about the brave things they are about to do, or just did, or are thinking of doing, or thought they might do, if they were not the people they are but had the superpowers we all wish we had. Our enterprises vary; our entertainments do not. Plans to bring down the hunt and bring home the anoa bacon change; our hopes of getting it done will never alter. It seems a good moral to take us through these difficult days and into the next decade. ♦
