Paleolithic Quotes

“in case we ever lose each other
always remember this
our sign
and i will find you again
as i go to find my brother'
the painter promises”
― Marie Burdett, The Little Boy and the Painter

“i painted it because i dreamed it
because we all dreamed it”
― Marie Burdett, The Little Boy and the Painter

“why do you paint in the dark'
i ask him
and he looks not at me
but away

'because i cannot bear my own darkness
in the light'
he is quiet for some time
'but inwardly i am told where
there is paint to be
and i paint it there in the dark
so none can see myself truly
burning in the sun”
― Marie Burdett, The Little Boy and the Painter

“Research from Baton and Konner in 1985 and Cordain et al. in 2000 estimated that about 65 per cent of the diets of pre-agricultural Palaeolithic humans may still have come from plants – far more than only your recommended five fruit and veg a day, I would say. Interestingly, anatomically modern humans are believed to have more copies of the starch-digesting genes than the Neanderthals and the Denisovans (another extinct species or subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle palaeolithic), suggesting that the ability to digest starch has been a continuous driver through human evolution as much as walking upright, having big brains and articulate speech - perhaps being a baker may be the oldest profession after all.”
― Jordi Casamitjana, Ethical Vegan: A Personal and Political Journey to Change the World

“finally he speaks
'if you come into my cave, child
you will not come out again unchanged'
his hands gesture beyond him
trying vainly to describe
something greater than him
'if you come into this deep cave,
down halls few feet have ever trod,
you will not be you again
you will be another you,
a newer you
a blinded yet unblinded being,
footsteps following the footsteps of those
who have painted here before
will you come?”
― Marie Burdett, The Little Boy and the Painter

“So not only was this curious bracelet [found at the Denisova cave] unequivocally the work of anatomically archaic human beings--the Denisovans-- but also it testified to their mastery of advanced manufacturing techniques in the Upper Paleolithic, many millennia ahead of the earliest use of these techniques in the Neolithic by our own supposedly "advanced" species, Homo sapiens. Also made crystal clear was the realization that the Denisovans must have possessed the same kinds of artistic sensibility and self-awareness that we habitually associate only with our own kind--for there can be no doubt that very real, conscious, aware, and unmistakably human beings had interacted with this bracelet at every stage of its conception, design, and manufacture, all the way through to its end use.”
― Graham Hancock, America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization

“Leroi-Gourhan écrit que, dans l'art des cavernes, signe féminin et blessure sont interchangeables : pour signifier la même idée, l'artiste, le penseur, l'écrivain paléolithique pouvait indifféremment figurer une vulve, une vache transpercée, le sang qui dégoutte d'une flèche. La vulve, le dol, la bête sous le merlin, le sang, sont synonymes ("Corps du roi", 40).”
― Andreï Makine

“As has often been said: beliefs and ideas cannot be fossilized. Hence certain scholars have preferred to say nothing about the ideas and beliefs of the Paleanthropians, instead of reconstructing them by the help of comparisons with the hunting civilizations. This radical methodological position is not without its dangers. To leave an immense part of the history of the human mind a blank runs the risk of encouraging the idea that during all those millennia the activity of the mind was confined to the preservation and transmission of technology. Such an opinion is not only erroneous, it is fatal to a knowledge of man. Homo faber was at the same time Homo ludens, sapiens, and religiosus.”
― Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries