Y'all Come Sit a Spell

Come sit a spell.

I have recently encountered some information that has caused me to question everything we’ve been taught about prehistoric civilization.

It started with dinner.

More specifically, it started with the fact that I wasn’t cooking it.

This was apparently unexpected news to the man in my house.

Now, before anyone becomes concerned, there was food in the house. There was an entire kitchen. It contained appliances, ingredients, utensils and, presumably, everything necessary to sustain human life for one evening.

I had even offered to make a fried egg sandwich earlier.

My offer had gone unanswered.

And yet, as evening progressed and it became increasingly apparent that dinner was not going to spontaneously manifest itself through my efforts, there was a certain amount of…discontent.

Eventually, there was some muttering about peanut butter and jelly.

And that’s when it hit me.

We used to send these people out to hunt mammoths.

Or so we’ve been told.

For thousands of years, we’ve accepted a fairly straightforward account of prehistoric life.

The men went hunting.

The women gathered things, tended children, maintained the camp, prepared food and presumably spent a considerable amount of time waiting for somebody to come home with a mastodon.

But standing there in my kitchen, observing a perfectly capable adult man confronting the possibility that he might have to assemble his own sandwich, I began to have questions.

Who exactly told us the men were doing all the hunting?

Because I’m starting to think we need to examine our sources.

Apparently, much of what we know about prehistoric people comes from archaeological evidence.

Fair enough.

But we also have cave paintings.

And have we considered the possibility that cave paintings were simply prehistoric social media?

Think about it.

There’s always some magnificent hunting scene.

Men with spears.

Massive animals.

Action.

Danger.

Heroism.

Very impressive.

But where are the cave paintings of what happened twenty minutes earlier?

“Where’s my spear?”

“I don’t know. Where did you leave it?”

“Have you seen my good hunting hide?”

“It’s exactly where you dropped it yesterday.”

“Is there anything to eat before we go?”

“There are berries.”

“I don’t want berries.”

And then, six hours later, the man returns from hunting, sits down beside the fire and announces that he’s starving.

Sir.

There is an entire cave.

Avail yourself.

The more I thought about it, the more suspicious I became.

What if prehistoric men weren’t actually the primary hunters?

What if they just had better public relations?

Maybe women were out there doing all sorts of essential things that didn’t make the cave-wall highlight reel because nobody thought gathering roots looked sufficiently dramatic.

Meanwhile, one guy successfully pokes a bison with a stick and immediately commissions a mural.

“Make sure you get my good side.”

Twenty thousand years later, we’re standing in museums admiring it and saying:

Ah yes. Man the Hunter.

Are we sure?

Because I’m looking at the modern evidence and I would like the historical record reopened.

To be fair, the man in my house did eventually locate the peanut butter and jelly.

So perhaps the ancient instincts remain.

The terrain has changed.

The prey is different.

But somewhere deep within the male genetic memory, there apparently remains the ability to venture bravely into unfamiliar territory, locate necessary provisions and return alive.

Granted, the unfamiliar territory was the kitchen.

And the provisions were in jars.

But evolution takes time.

The investigation continues.