Cave paintings at the Bhimbetka Rock Shelters in Madhya Pradesh in India.
By Joshua Sokol Feb. 5, 2021 in the NY Times
This phrase so struck me,
“Over time, art styles shifted. Human figures donned clothes. Horses and elephants sprouted riders. Wars danced across sandstone faces. Today, many of the cave walls are now palimpsests, with medieval warriors covering Chalcolithic art on top of even older Mesolithic drawings.”
This is the recorded history of the changes wrought by major shifts in human history, does the record show us becoming clothed? Or perhaps the ability to depict a clothed human. But most amazing is what seems to me to be the indisputable record of domestication directly recorded unmistakably by the folk who were there.
I found myself, one time, in my Poke Boat against the shore next to one of the remaining oyster shell middens in Maine. I picked up an oyster shell and felt guilty and was flooded with awe, the last time this shell had been touched by a human, and it was unmistakably a shell that had last been touched by humans one to two thousand years ago. The river banks there were lined with tall mounds of oyster shells left from generations of locals who shucked each and every one. They shucked ’em out, as the sad truth goes, we are recently bringing back oysters to the area. The mounds were so vast, that they were mined for the calcium content for chicken feed in the 1880s until most were gone.