A story at Discovery Channel News suggests that teenagers and tagging have gone hand in hand since the Pleistocene. From Wooster Collective:
Testosterone-fueled boys created most prehistoric cave art, according to a recently published book by one of the world’s leading authorities on cave art.
The theory contradicts the idea that adult, tribal shaman spiritual leaders and healers produced virtually all cave art.
It also explains why many of the images drawn in caves during the Pleistocene, between 10,000 and 35,000 years ago, somewhat mirror today’s artwork and graffiti that are produced by adolescent males.
“Today, boys draw the testosterone subjects of a hot automobile, fighter jet, Jedi armor, sports, direct missile hit, etc.-- all of the things they associate with the Adrenalin of success,” said R. Dale Guthrie, author of “The Nature of Paleolithic Art.”
Guthrie, who is a professor emeritus in the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, added, “I think the full larder (of) success of the excitement and danger of killing a giant bison or auroch in the Pleistocene was the equivalent of the testosterone art today.”
This rang a bell.
You know those stypagarous (big hipped, big butted) clay figurines?
About thirty years back, National Lampoon ran a comic story (illustrated by Shary Flenniken) about how ancient humans came to be dominated by a patriarchy.
Way back when, the story notes, cave people lived in a matriarchal society. Men were the religious leaders, however. They made stypagarous goddess figures and — while the women were out hunting and doing all the work — crawled in back of the cave and “worshipped” them. Five-fingered worship, if you get my drift.
Eventually the women get sick and tired of this freeloading, and kick the guys out of the cave and told to make themselves useful. Which they do, eventually taking over and mucking things up real good.
Comment by Stefan Jones — 4/4/2006 @ 12:12 pm