we've infantilized our origins as cave dwellers, becoming superior to ourselves - a N'itchy leap-over-your-father mentality, which is itself funny, as the immutable generational presence is evidence of its heritability.
i think it was in Wade Davis' Massey Lecture contribution, The Wayfinders, where he discusses petroglyphs as the subterranean nursery of the minds, the creches whence we dreamed ourselves awake. i've returned the book to the lender, else i'd pluck a plump morsel for you, but i recall Davis proffering another's interpretation of the cave painting: less as rudimentary alphabet, and more of a pining frustration. to draw the wild horse was the divisive act of an essentialist recognition, the animal-not-animal captured-released... ah, spelunked it out of the internet... here it is...
"...clearly at some point we were all of an animal nature and at some point we were not and he viewed proto-shamanism as kind of an original attempt through ritual to rekindle a connection that had been irrevocably lost. So he saw this art not as hunting magic but as postcards of nostalgia." -- Wade Davis on Clayton Eshleman
