The Nomadic Alternative – Page 142

burying grounds or butchering floors. And the overall picture of

the urmensch suggests they were creatures of gargantuan appetites

and energy, born butchers, with a limitless capacity for protein,

and able to manage a large mammal for dinner.

Some three hundred thousand years ago near Torralba in Spain a

tribe of hunters, perhaps at once, perhaps on separate occasions,

stampeded about fifty elephants into a marsh till they were well

bogged down, killed them and cut them all up for meat very methodi-

cally with hand axes and cleavers. This feat implies a seething

horde of people, not just a few hungry mouths. And what the operation

suggests in the way of social organization, one can only guess -

probably something along the lines of a large mediaeval battle.

A cave is a relatively salubrious dwelling place. Caves are cool

in summer and warm in winter. And people like the Magdalenian big-

game hunters in the Dordogne adored their womb-like lairs and

preferred to stay in them. The layers of exquisite painting and

engraving superimposed on their walls and the depth of human refuse

stratified over their floors are the very embodiment of settlement.

Lascaux has the scale and style of a great cathedral. A study of

antlers recovered from one Magdalenian cave revealed that butchering

operations continued throughout the year. Pekin Man too lived in

his charnel-house home, and Polyphemus, the Caveman, was a cannibal.

Troglodytes are vicious, religious and neurotic.

No excavator, however, could unearth the scoop in the sand the

Kalahari Bushman calls his home and which he changes from day to

day. The Yaghan felt the spooky claustrophobia of cave life, just

as a true Bedouin flatly declines to sleep under a roof. In West

Africa I told a French anthropologist I wanted to see what vestiges

of a tribe of cattle-breeding nomads would leave behind them for

a future archaeologist to recover. She smiled and told me of the

Bororo Peuls. "Alas, you would only find their footprints and hoof-

marks and the garlands their dancers hang on the trees when they

shift camp." This is exactly what I wanted to know. The archaeologist

would find nothing.