Just who Painted the Upper Paleolithic Masterpieces?

Well, scientists will tell you that the Cro-Magnon people composed the incredible painted art, which survives in deep caves scattered across France and Spain, from a period of activity extending from about 35,0000 until 13,000 years ago. Scientists otherwise refer to these particular human beings as "archaic humans" or "early modern humans" or homo sapiens sapiens cromagnonensis. The genius of these creations is the combined lightness of line and richness of color in the depictions, not to mention the three-dimensionality, dynamic poses and anatomical accuracy in the execution. The subject matter is principally of herding animals (some of which are now extinct), such as wild horses, woolly mammoths, aurochs, ibexes, deer, bison, etc. The "canvas" is often of the most challenging sort, being the rather uneven and awkward surfaces of undressed stone that naturally form the walls and ceilings of caves, some of which are sea-caves! More ingeniously, these prehistoric artists have often chosen and adapted peculiar natural abstract (though imaginatively evocative) forms in the surface of these caves to enhance the three dimensional effect of their realistic subjects. All of it was done with flickering torch light, there being no benefit from natural daylight at their degree of remove from the Earth's surface. Coming from humans that are many thousands of years away from having any need of writing that we might otherwise know them, it is a profound link of understanding with the intelligence and values of the distant forebears to the present state of our species. It should not even be a concern that we should have to make any assumption about the color of the skin of these human beings, but in light of the latent racism raising its ugly head across America today in the form of the Tea Party movement, it is a matter that should be explicitly revealed. In point of fact, Europe was settled by groups of modern human beings from Africa some 50,000 years ago. At the time human beings made these paintings, our own DNA reveals that there had not been enough time for the mathematically calculable genetic drift to occur for these prehistoric people to look anything specifically like the average native European living today. In short, the master artists who painted all the exceptional paintings of such places as Altamira Cave and Lascaux Cave had a high melanin content in their skin and kinky hair. Need I be more specific? They were Negroes in the phenotypical or "racial" sense of that word. Gradually, these people would acquire lighter and lighter skin, and tangentially straighter hair over the succeeding millennia as an adaptation to the lesser quality of sunlight in Europe as compared to the plentiful sunlight under which the ancestors of every human being alive today evolved in Africa. This is a very small matter for those of us who realize the illusoriness of defining people by superficial physical differences, but I recommend the following book (which addresses itself to far more important and fascinating questions of human evolution), and which establishes the scientific truth of what I have just imparted: Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors. Written by Nicholas Wade. Published by Penguin Books. Copyright 2007.