Chapter 58

There’s a special lecture at Hugo’s school, “Before History: Cro-Magnon Man and the Dawn of Civilization,” and he wants to go. I go with him; off and on Hugo’s told me a lot about his people and how they lived, but of course it’s just a small slice of that time and I’d like to know more.

The lecturer is a youngish professor of paleontology at the school and he has a very different perspective from most of what I’ve read about Hugo’s time. No beetle-browed cavemen for him, he really likes these people!

“Today we don’t just look back to Cro-Magnon man, we look down on him,” he says. “We look around us at all the technological marvels we’ve created, the great infrastructure of society, and then we think back on these nomadic hunter-gatherers and view them as innately inferior to our own glorious selves.

“Rubbish! Genetically they were our equals, no, probably our betters. The DNA makeup was the same, but the survival rate for children was probably no more than a fraction of ours. It was truly survival of the fittest, and only the very fittest specimens survived to reproduce and pass on their genes. The lame, the halt, anyone who wasn’t grade-A, top-of-the-line, physically and mentally, didn’t make it. No dilution of the gene pool then, it wasn’t possible.”

Right on the money there. I look over at my very own grade-A, top-of-the-line specimen and smile.

“OK, you say, physically yes, but mentally?” the professor goes on. “And that’s the popular perception, popular not only with the general public but even a lot of those who work in my field, that Cro-Magnon was, well, mentally challenged. Why? Well, I mean these guys lived in caves, didn’t they? They had no agriculture, no animal husbandry, no metallurgy, they didn’t even have the wheel! What dummies they must have been!”

It’s hard not to laugh out loud; in a little over four years my “mentally challenged” guy is well on his way to a college degree. And the good professor seems to agree.

“What all this overlooks is that technological development is a process, building on itself,” he says. “Want to build a computer? First you’ve got to have the transistors, the wiring, the chips. To have those you need to extract the petroleum, the metals, and make the precision equipment. For that you need machinery and equipment that requires more machinery and equipment to build, and on and on back through more steps than I can begin to describe.

“But the process had to start somewhere. And where was that? Right here“—he flashes up a photo of the interior of a cave on the big screen—”in the caves where Cro-Magnon lived!”

Hugo’s shaking his head in annoyance. I remember him telling Danny so long ago that he hadn’t lived in a cave, he’d lived in a house, and his tone said he was damn proud of that house even if it was “not so fine” as my cabin.

I wish the professor could have heard him.

He talks about Cro-Magnon’s achievements, “those few that have survived the many thousands of years and have come down to us.” The cave paintings, of course. The flint work, “an art form in itself and a huge forward step.” Bone sewing needles and other such tools.

“We can only speculate about what else they must have had, have made for themselves; time has left few traces,” he continues. “But all you hear from a lot of people, a lot too many people, is why didn’t they have more? Why did it take them so long to reach even the rudiments of agriculture, of construction of permanent settlements, of herding animals instead of leaving them wild to be hunted?

“Well, think about it! Exactly when was Cro-Magnon supposed to have thought up these things, which are really major advances? Edison invented the light-bulb when? In time he could set aside to think about it, leisure time. Einstein developed his relativity theory when? Right, in leisure time, time away from work.

“For Cro-Magnon leisure time was a rare luxury. Every day, every hour had to be devoted to a struggle to keep on living in a world that was indifferent to his survival. He needed full time and attention to keep himself alive, to provide for his family. The wonder isn’t that he didn’t develop technology sooner, the wonder is that he began to develop it at all!”

Hugo’s listening intently and watching the array of slides and re-creations the speaker is displaying. I know some of what he’s saying is wrong, at least according to the way Hugo has talked about it to me, but at least this isn’t the patronizing attitude that was so evident in the museum display.