What Does The Sorcerer See?

"The Sorcerer"

Around 15,000 years ago someone painted upon the walls of a cave in France a puzzling image of a creature made up of part horse, part lion, part stag, part owl, bear feet and hands that look human. This famous cave art became known as The Sorcerer. The image is found in the Cave of the Trois Frères (Three Brothers) named after the three brothers (Max, Jacques, and Louis Begouën) who, along with their father, discovered the cave in 1912.

The Sorcerer (see graphic) was reproduced by Henri Breuil, who studied cave art and was well versed in archaeology, anthropology, and ethnology. Since Breuil’s rendition other scholars have questioned whether the antlers are truly part of the painting or just appear so because of the rock the painting is situated on. Alternatively, it may be that the paleolithic painter deliberately included cracks in the rock as part of the image.

The painting has been surmised to depict shamanic ritual and as evidence of a Horned God in paleolithic times.

If the Sorcerer was meant to depict a shaman when painted, then it would be unusual for it to have been so, as most paintings in the cave, and other caves in the area, do not depict humans at all, although human form does seem to exist in a few places, for instance in the form of a man-bison.

Thus, the painting is interpreted through the eyes of the beholder. When you look at the painting, what do you see? A shaman? The various animals? A blend of all the animals?

Perhaps the most striking facet that you see is the eyes.

The eyes are looking directly at you. They look out of the wall of the cave, straight at the viewer. The eyes are not looking at other animals or objects on the cave walls. They are looking clearly at us (the viewer). The painter is interacting with us.

Why?

What was the painter of The Sorcerer looking at through those eyes? Was the painter so immersed in the painting that they were painting as if they were The Sorcerer? Were they painting as if it was their own eyes looking out at us (now viewing the painting 15,000 years later)?

If so, then what were they looking at? What did they see?

We don’t know how long these caves had been hidden from human view since the time the art was painted.

Yet, eerily, and perhaps unnervingly, those eyes seem to peer across the centuries and regard the viewer with disdain. It is as if the paleolithic painter 15,000 years ago was peering at us, and asking, what have you done?

Since the painting of The Sorcerer global human population has exploded from an estimated 1 – 10 million people to 8.3 billion this year (2026). That is an increase of 8,000 to 80,000 percent!

Since the painting of The Sorcerer, woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, giant sloths, and cave bears have all gone extinct. Plant biomass has been halved, and wild mammals have been reduced by 85%. 15,000 years ago the Earth’s ecosystems were characterised by high density and a wide diversity. This density and diversity no longer exist, except in parts of Africa.

Is The Sorcerer scrutinising us with an accusatory look?

You be the judge. In this case, culpability may be in the eyes of the beholder.

Happy Hour

In many countries of the world pubs, inns, and restaurants advertise a Happy Hour. Usually in the early evening, Happy Hour is marked by reduced prices for drinks in a marketing effort to get customers in at a time when the venue is quiet.

In Australia graduating High School students engage in what is known as Schoolies Week. This is a week following the end of final year exams. Sadly, this time can be marred by heavy drinking, drugs, and violence.

Both these cultural occasions may be poor substitutes for activities now lost from our westernised experience.

Thousands of years ago before we began to settle in large towns and villages, our community would have come together around a fire. We would have shared food, told stories, sung songs, and danced together. It would have been a time for rejoicing, laughing, and connecting. It would have been the time when stories of the hunt would have been told, or the location of a tree about to bear fruit was mentioned. Perhaps an Elder or the Shaman of the clan would have re-enacted the clan’s history.

Is this what Happy Hour tries to duplicate, but without understanding what it is being resurrected? Without true Elders and Shaman Happy Hour can only ever be a semblance of what has been.

So too, Schoolies Week is a pitiable surrogate for the coming-of-age rituals that once marked the transition from childhood to adulthood in our cultural past?

Yet there is a memory in these modern-day events. Although we may have lost and forgotten the ceremonies, rituals, and rites that marked our time many millennia ago, we instinctively know that something is missing.

How many other modern-day customs are an attempt to re-engage with something primally human? Yet, many of these modern customs have been stripped of their sacredness and their significance. Here are just a few that come to mind:

Childbirth. Once a ceremony and rite involving the women of the community it is now often confined to a sterile hospital setting and overseen by men.

Education. Once an ongoing aspect of life where one learnt throughout the day, and as things arose, in an outdoor setting. Nowadays, education is shut off inside classrooms and lasts only a limited number of years.

Elderhood. Once a respected role in a community, a true Elder held the sacred knowledge and wisdom of the clan. Today, very few true Elders remain, and we have substituted it with “Olders” who are then siphoned off to Old Folks Homes, away from the community.

If our bodies retain a memory of ancient rituals, ceremonies, and rites, then can we reach into the depths of our collective soul to regain the meaning and sacredness of them?

Just a thought to ponder.

Agricultural Devolution [1]

The Agricultural Revolution, beginning about 10,000 – 12,000 years ago, is often considered to be one of the greatest inventions or innovations of human history. Where would we be today if it were not for the Agricultural Revolution?

Well, that is a very good question.

Most of us would probably answer that we would be a lot worse off without agriculture. We would still be having to forage for food and hunt out prey just to eat and survive, or so the thinking goes. We would still be living in caves or crude shelters the common understanding tells us.

The Agricultural Revolution has enabled us to progress and distinguishes us from a primitive and crude existence, doesn’t it?

At least that is the story that most of us have grown up with and learnt from history books, from our parents and teachers. Agriculture is what we see every time we enter a supermarket; walking the aisles  and reaching for items off the shelf confirms our belief in the superiority of an agriculturally based society.

It is a nice and comforting story. But, it is based more on fairytale than on reality.

Agriculture just may be the most unhealthy innovation in our history. How so, I hear you ask.

The science of paleopathology has been very helpful in enabling us to gain a greater understanding of the lives of our ancestors before the advent of agriculture. From the mid-20^th century onwards paleopathology (the study of ancient disease and injury) has vastly increased our knowledge of ancient societies and their health or unhealth.

At the end of the last Ice Age (roughly 11,700 years ago) the average height of a male hunter-gatherer in Europe was 1.78 metres and 1.68 metres for the average female hunter-gatherer. The Agricultural Revolution swept from the Fertile Crescent through Europe between about 10,000 years ago and 6,000 years ago (when it reached Britain.) In that period, the average height of human beings (now agriculturalists) dropped, respectively, down to 1.60 metres for men, and 1.55 metres for women.^2,3 That is a significant decrease.

The average height of men and women in Europe has only in the past century or so returned to that of pre-Agricultural Revolution times.

Dental health also showed a decline post-Agricultural Revolution. Cavities and enamel defects appear far more frequently in the population following the take up of agriculture.

The Agricultural Revolution included the domestication of animals for the first time (apart from a few animals kept as pets previously.) This domestication became a breeding ground for a number of diseases and plagues, such as smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, and cholera. These diseases entered humans from their domesticated farm animals, and were exacerbated by human and animal densities brought about by the rise of large settlements and cities.^2,3

How did this happen?

Whereas hunter-gatherers had previously enjoyed a wide variety of food sources, agriculture focussed very much on starchy crops, e.g. corn, rice, wheat. Jared Diamond refers to this as ‘the farmers gaining cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition.’⁴

Not only was agriculture a poor substitute, it also was prone to drought, floods, fire, locusts, and other disasters likely to wipe out a whole year’s crop. Starvation became more likely following the Agricultural Revolution, not less.

Ah, but all that is behind us now, we have got over the worst of it, and now agriculture is of benefit in feeding us, isn’t it? We are now more healthy than we have ever been, we are living longer and better, are we not?

Yes, and no!

Those same three crops – corn, rice, wheat – still provide more than 50% of the calories consumed by humans.

Tuberculosis, cholera, and measles still curse the people in many countries of the world. It is sobering to note, too, that some diseases are now greater than ever before – especially those related to eating, food, and – agriculture. Obesity rates in most westernised nations have been trending upwards for many decades. Diabetes too, hardly heard of in hunter-gatherer societies, has been trending upwards – rising at a faster rate than many other chronic diseases.

But, we are living longer, are we not? Yes, we are. Life expectancy has been increasing. For many, life expectancy has doubled over the past couple of centuries. Is this longer than it was for our hunter-gatherer ancestors? Again, the answer is yes and no!

Paleopathology informs us that the life expectancy, at birth, for those living prior to the Agricultural Revolution was about 30 years – roughly the same as for Europeans two centuries ago. However, the life expectancy of hunter-gatherers is skewed towards the shorter end of the continuum because of high infant and childhood mortality. Once childhood had been surpassed, the average hunter-gatherer could expect to live for around 70 to 80 years – approximately that of today’s humans on average.

Two more questions need to be asked.

First, are we really living longer, or are we, in reality, dying longer? In other words, have we extended our life, or have we extended our death, as Stephen Jenkinson would claim.⁵ For many the last decade or two of life is actually a lengthy dying process.

Second, is it agriculture that has enabled us to live longer, or is it improvements and innovations in medical interventions? If we ponder this question, we must admit that most of our increased longevity has been because of innovations in medical knowledge and practice. Many diseases that once plagued us have declined, or been totally eradicated, not because of better nutrition and agriculture, but through medical knowledge.

Finally, let me quote Jared Diamond again. He claims that the ‘advent of agriculture…(was) the worst mistake in the history of the human race.’⁶

The history of agriculture suggests that he may be right.

Notes:

1. Devolution has two meanings. One is the transfer or delegation of power from a higher body to a lower one (e.g. from central government to local government). The second meaning is a descent to a worse state. It is the second of these meanings that is used here.

2. Jeremy Lent, The Patterning Instinct: A cultural history of humanity’s search for meaning, Prometheus Books, Maryland, USA, 2017

3. Jared Diamond, The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee, Vintage Books, London, 2002

4. Ibid. p169

5. Stephen Jenkinson, Die Wise, North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, California, 2015

6. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race

Quality of Quality of Life

One of the social indicators that many wish to extol about modern life is that life expectancy has increased. Indeed it has. By about 20 – 25 years since the Industrial Revolution.

If we consider an even longer timeframe, say back to Palaeolithic times then there has been a significant increase in the quantity of life that we now live. Although estimates vary, the consensus of archaeologists tends towards recognising that once a hunter/gatherer reached about 15 years of age then he/she could expect to live a further 35 to 40 years. That is, an adult living in the Palaeolithic would be likely to reach an age of 50 – 55 years.

So, yes indeed, the quantity of years that has been added to human life has increased markedly.

But – has the quality of life increased?

During the 1970s, I recall, there was much discussion about quality of life and how that should be the goal of personal life and that governments could play a role in facilitating that. However, in recent years I find that I rarely hear the phrase. It is as though something else has grabbed our attention and we have forgotten that quality of life may be a worthwhile goal.

Or, is it that we have conflated quality of life with quantity of life?

Let’s find out.

First though, how is quality of life defined? Philosophers, sociologists, poets, politicians, and spiritual leaders have all proposed definitions over many centuries. Herein, I am using a simple metric as a proxy for quality of life. That metric is the amount of leisure time we have, once we have accounted for work hours, sleep, and education. None of this is rigorous, and the arithmetic involved is very much back of a napkin computation.

The next thing that must be considered is how much leisure time do we have today compared to previous times. There are 8,766 hours in a year. Sleep (at 8 hours per night) takes up 2,922 of those hours. In the OECD (the richer nations of the world) the average working year consists of 1,900 hours. That leaves 3,944 hours for eating, commuting, and human activities that contribute towards quality of life.

We can factor in education. In the OECD most children go to school between the ages of 5 – 15 years, for 40 weeks per year. That is about 670 hours per year.

If all these numbers are crunched (I won’t bore you with the arithmetic details) then leisure time (quality of life) for people living today to the age of 75 is around 227,000 – 230,000 hours over the course of their lifetime.

Now, let us consider the quality of life enjoyed by our ancestors, both those who lived prior to the Industrial Revolution and those living much earlier as hunter/gatherers in Palaeolithic times.

These next figures may surprise you, yet they are the considered opinion of experts in the field. A peasant working before the Industrial Revolution is likely to have worked only some 1,440 hours per year – less than half the OECD average of today.¹

In 1968 Marshall Sahlins (an American cultural anthropologist) wrote an influential essay titled The Original Affluent Society, in which he claimed that hunter/gatherers “worked” far fewer hour per week than we tend to think. He termed this approach to life/work balance as ‘the Zen road to affluence.’ Sahlin’s essay has been much quoted, verified, and expanded upon by many researchers since then.² Sahlins and others show that for many modern-day nomadic tribespeople and hunter/gatherers of yore, work took up between 2 and 4 hours per day.

Now, for the interesting bit.

If we calculate leisure time per year with the lifespan of hunter/gatherers and modern-day nomadic people, then the total hours of leisure (quality of life) equates to around 202,000 to 205,000 hours over their lifetime.

That is not much less than the 227,000 hours of leisure that modern-day humans in rich societies obtain. Further calculation shows that the difference is only 2.5 – 3.2 years!

Is that all? Three years or less? Just that for all our vaunted increase in quantity of life.

And, what have we done with this extra three years of leisure time?

Wasted it!

Modern humans spend much of leisure time sitting watching television, or glued to the mini-screen of an iPhone, or playing computer games, or other mindless, and ultimately self-comatosing, pastimes. Statistics from both Australia and the USA show that well over 60% of leisure time is spent in front of the TV or a computer. Not much quality in this quantity of life.

Contrast this with the use of leisure time by hunter/gatherers and pre-Industrial Revolution peasants. Their time was taken up with dancing, storytelling, humour, music making, communal gatherings, feasts, arts, crafts, playing, ritual, and similar activities.

Let us then ask: Who has/had the greater quality of life?

Notes:

1. See for example, Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Basic Books, New York, 1992

2. Glendinning, Chellis, My Name Is Chellis & I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization, Shambhala Publications, Boston & London, 1994. Graeber, David & Wengrow, David, The Dawn of Everything, Penguin Books, UK, 2021. Lent, Jeremy, The Patterning Instinct, Prometheus Books, Lanham, Maryland, 2017.

Forgotten Forgetting

Every so often I come across two prevailing beliefs in conversations. One is that humans are innately selfish, prone to violence, and/or nasty. The other is that our hunter-gatherer ancestors often beat each other up to steal scarce resources. The two beliefs are linked. They are both highly debatable, and most likely false.

The common imagery associated with the second of these beliefs is that of opposing groups of hunter-gatherers coming into contact and, using clubs, spears, and other weapons, attacking one another. Such imagery supposes that one group may have just killed a deer, and the other group wishes to steal the deer for their own use.

A further image of hunter-gatherers is that of the males going off and taking a woman of another group by force and dragging her (many images show by the hair) back to his own cave.

These images are palpably untrue.

Yet, these images, and the beliefs themselves, are likely to be the source of the first belief – that humans are inherently malicious and horrible creatures - or perhaps stem from that belief themselves.

Over the years these images and beliefs have had their adherents, sometimes advanced by high profile, and influential people. One of the most notable was the 17^th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In his book, Leviathan,¹ Hobbes curtly and bluntly summed up the belief that humans are innately unpleasant by stating that the ‘life of man (is) solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short.’

Hobbes’ solution to this condition was to enter into a social contract by which citizens give up their freedoms to powerful individuals and/or parliaments in exchange for safety. By expanding upon this notion Hobbes became known as the father of political philosophy.

Hobbes’ summary is a very bleak assessment of the nature of humanity, isn’t it?

Yet, I hear and read versions of this assessment constantly from many people; from esteemed authors to those I share a coffee with. Our culture seems to have adopted this view uncritically. Perhaps, more likely, we have simply forgotten how things were before we took to agriculture in a big way. Daniel Quinn calls this The Great Forgetting; the ‘fact that before the advent of agriculture and village life, humans had lived in a profoundly different way.’²

Over the past 10,000 years or so, not only have we forgotten how things were, but we have also even forgotten that we have forgotten. So that nowadays we assume that our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short’ lives, because that was the way Hobbes and others saw the world of their time. This judgment by Hobbes and others has entered our cultural belief system and worldview, so much so that it goes unquestioned.

Yet, research by palaeontologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists challenges the belief. This research shows that our ancestors roamed over large expanses, yet when they encountered other groups, the contact was not one of distrust or aggression. More often it was to trade, to re-acquaint with friends or relatives, to find mates (outside of one’s own clan), to learn new skills, and to participate in ceremonies and rituals. As the authors of one review paper claim, hunter-gatherers ‘moved because they were part of a mobile society that was large, complex, and distributed.’³

Our hunter-gather ancestors did not live in isolated small groups according to these researchers. Hunter-gather society was complex and interrelated. This is what we have forgotten.

During Hobbes’ time the research techniques of palaeontologists and anthropologists were not available to him; consequently, he was unable to remember life thousands of years before. He most likely assumed that what he saw of British society of his time was how things had always been. His words became explanations without evidence. Today, as I hear and see these same images and beliefs repeated, they sound and look more and more like justification, rather than simply explanation. If not outright justification, then at least tolerant credibility.

Today, we try to find ways to overcome aggression, violence, poverty, and harshness, because we think these arise from our innate human nature. But, if we have forgotten our state of nature as it was for 95% of our human existence, then we do not need to find ways to overcome our nature: we simply need to stop forgetting.

Notes:

1. To give its full title: Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. First published in 1651. (They were prone to protracted book titles at that time.)

2. Daniel Quinn, Have You Heard of the Great Forgetting? An excerpt from his book The Story of B. It used to be on his Ishmael.com website, but with the shift to Ishmael.org it has disappeared. However, the article is still available on the Films for Action website - https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/the-great-forgetting/  accessed 16 October 2024

3. Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias, Why do hunter-gatherers refuse to be sedentary? University of Zūrich, March 2024 https://aeon.co/essays/the-hunter-gatherers-of-the-21st-century-who-live-on-the-move  accessed 16 October 2024

Vita Brevis, Vita Continuus

Cueva de las Manos,
Argentina

How long is your life? Many would answer that life is fleeting. Indeed, there is a saying – Ars longa, vita brevis – claiming that art is long, and life is short.

Well, yes, it is, when viewed in cosmic terms. Three score and ten (70 years) is the supposed appointed human life expectation. That is just a blink compared with the age of the Universe.

Compared with how long Homo sapiens have been treading the Earth (200,000 – 300,000 years) 70 years is fleeting. Suppose you visualise your allotted 70 years as 7 cm – the average length of a man’s thumb. Then the first Homo sapiens began striding across the Earth some 200 to 300m away from us. That’s a lot of thumb lengths.

Measured like this then, our human lives are short and fleeting.

And art is long.

Speaking of art. There is another perspective with which we could look at our lives. And, there is no need to change the timeline with which we considered life’s fleeting nature.

All around the world there is art from millennia ago – cave art.

No matter who we are, or what part of the world we come from, it is likely that an ancestor of ours was responsible for (or witnessed the making of) one or more of these paintings.

One of the oldest sites is the cave of Maltravieso in Spain. Uranium-thorium dating gives a date of 64,000 years ago for a hand-stencil in that cave. It is thought that the creator of this hand-stencil was possibly Homo neanderthalensis. Since modern Europeans have around 1% - 3% Neanderthal DNA then, if you have European ancestry, were the paintings in this cave created by an ancestor of yours?

Or, further East. Hand-stencilling found on a cave on the island of Sulawesi, in Indonesia, are dated to 39,900 years ago. What is of further interest is that paintings of an almost life-size Sulawesi warty pig, found in 2021, has been dated to at least 45,000 years old. This makes it the oldest figurative cave art in the world. Perhaps your ancestor caught the pig, or painted the pig, or cooked and ate the pig around a fire with companions?

In the Cave of Hands (Cueva de las Manos) in Argentina there are hundreds of hands stencilled on rock walls in a number of collages. The earliest of these paintings were stencilled around 9,000 years ago, and the youngest just 1,300 years ago. Perhaps a hand from an ancestor of yours is amongst them?

The final example in this blog of cave art comes from Australia. At a site known as Nawarla Gabarnmung (Hole in the Rock) in Arnhem Land, far north Australia, the walls are covered with paintings of fish, crocodiles, wallabies, people, and spiritual beings. These depictions are at least 44,000 years old, and could be as old as 60,000 years. These paintings were created by the ancestors of someone alive today.

The purpose of the above examples is to show that we are all part of a continuous life. We may not know the name of those wo created these cave art pieces, but we can be sure they were ancestors of ours, or of someone we know.

So, yes, our individual lives may be fleeting, but our lives are part of a continuing cycle of life. A life cycle that has been in existence for at least 300,000 years.

Let us amend that Latin phrase then:

Ars longa, Vita brevis, Vita continuus.