The First Artists

At the end of the last big ice age some of our ancestors lived in caves, nearby the receding glaciers, in the south of France.

From these caves they hunted: aurochs, mastodons, mammoth & mountain goat.
I will makes some guesses about the social structure of the tribe. I imagine the old men (30 +) mumbling in a corner, mumbling cause their teeth had fallen out. Because of that, and the resulting malfunctioning digestion, they soon will die.
Adult males (14-30) are boss, woman & children have tasks like wood gathering, food gathering & - preparation.
But one of the young men has a secret. He doesn't like hunting, dying animals, blood on the ground. He hates the male's macho behavior. When they all start running he arrives last.
With that attitude, he was worthless to the tribe.
I don't know how he did it, but suddenly it was like this:

Every time a hunt was planned he crawled away to deep nearly unreachable places in the cave, to do a drawing of the hunt on the wall.

That way he guaranteed the success of the hunt, because he thoughtfully drew the spears in the vital parts of the animals.
And lo! The next day the spears actually hit the animals in the right places! (the ones that did not were misses).
The tribe did not understand the relation between his drawing & the hunt so they handled it as powerful magic, thereby promoting our young man to shaman.
The tribe was right in one thing…as soon as the connection is made between the imagination & reality, strange things will happen.
The drawings programmed the thoughts, the expectation patterns of the hunters.

But accidents do happen.

This cave drawing probably shows a wounded bison, attacking a hunter.
I ask myself, how did he show his drawings to the hunters? What excuse, tale or intention did he use? And how did the hunters react to the drawing of the wounded man?
Not a dead beast this time, but beast on wall dead = beast on ground dead.. man on wall, dead ?
Who ? Who of us ?


Nobody ever dared to pester him or hit him. You could be drawn dead on the wall.