In the same vein of cave paintings having children’s handprints higher than their height suggesting them being lifted up or sitting on the shoulders of adults, there’s footprints in Australia dating to the Ice Age showing a group of adults and children walking to a body a water, and one child breaking away from the group to seemingly skip in a wavy path until rejoining the group
This is like 20 thousand years ago! And the joy and happiness of going to water made this child playfully skip along! It’s universal! Dancing their way back to their family!
In a language we will never hear, a culture we’ll never know, with thoughts and ideas we can only imagine! There are millennia of untold moments of happiness, of human connection and warmth that are gone forever. But they still happened! Did that family even notice the tracks they left? How could they have known that that one day their impossibly distant descendants would be able to see the imprints they made?
Another set of tracks in the same area shows three men hunting a giant kangaroo, running at incredible speeds, but one of them had only one foot! They jumped along on one foot, every so often an imprint from a stick appearing. How did they lose their limb? An accident? A fight? A predator? Was it completely gone or maimed? Was it from birth? Either way this person was cared for by their family and was able to heal and participate fully in life! They most likely felt grief when their family member lost the use of their limb! Who cared for them? Who gave them the stick to help them walk? What kind of joy did their family feel when they made a recovery? Did someone shape and carve the stick? They certainly worked all of their other wooden tools, something as essential that would have been too.
This was during the ice age when Australia became a brutally cold, dry desert. Their entire food system had to change. By all indications it should have been a stark and difficult life of little resources. But no! They worked together! They looked after their wounded and sick! The speed that these hunters were running at was incredible and means they were well fed and healthy! A millennia of helping one another and caring for one another and all we can get are tiny glimpses of these moments did they catch the kangaroo did they laugh and congratulate each other when they did how happy were they to bring it back to their families I just
There were people who survived trephination long enough for bone to regrow over the hole. Can you even imagine the care that must have required, in prehistoric times with no sanitation or tech or medicine? We have proof, in the form of human remains, that disabled people who couldn’t have walked or fed themselves survived for years in the Stone Age. We have cave paintings that were clearly made by an adult and a child together, one teaching the other.
The past was brutal, but that doesn’t mean everyone who lived in it was.
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