All in the Family

The Mammoth Hunters lived some time ago in what is called the Gravettian culture which lasted a long time — 29,000 B.C. to 22,000 B.C. This was mankind’s flowering time. It seemed that the art of communication was taking hold. Skills and ideas, whole systems of living could be handed down so the specific needs of the next generation could more easily be fulfilled. If you were living in the paleolithic times with a forecast of freezing weather coming to last the next ten thousand years, you would want better for your kids too.

Music came into being, as did pottery, art, burials of nostalgia …
A group of mammoth hunters lived in what is now Dolni Vestonice in Monrovia. This is where 25,000 years ago, the mammoth hunters lived. All evidence points to a well-lived life at that.

The main job of the men, of course, was to hunt mammoths, a dangerous job but who wouldn’t want to do that instead of slaving away in some  office? Some people would spend enormous amounts of cash for the opportunity to go on a mammoth hunt. Why shooting a regular elephant after that would be like shooting the neighbor’s dog which you could do any day of the week.

Meanwhile, the women of the tribe, whose skeletons showed well-formed, healthy individuals, actually some very in shape ladies so I hear, contributed to the well-being of the tribe in other ways.  They snared foxes and birds in nets, collected whatever they could, some say special herbs, mushrooms that enabled the eater of which to witness the pantheon on the Sky Gods.

Now listen carefully. These supposed poor wretches of prehistory, was their life not better than ours with its traffic, bills, constraints, rights, responsibilities, insurance policies, marriage, murder, and mayhem?

Think on the life inside the shelter  — daughters making shirts, leggings, sons making ready the throwing spears. There finally is the warm hearth. The family of man is born.

Think of the Mammoth Hunters my friends. This is where man really started his little exercise. This will be the way we go.