There are a number of opinions about the Bible and, as is too often the case, they tend to divide, rather than unite us. Some people think the Bible is the unerring word of God, each and every verse. Others think it’s “divinely inspired,” but perhaps not absolutely correct in every respect.

Other people – many of my friends on the left – are surprised when I make a reference to the Bible. “Do you read that?” they ask, in a tone of incredulity and amusement.

Yes, I do. I don’t think it’s all true and I have no ideas about its inspiration. I do know it is a book written from centuries of human experience and the people who wrote it are, whether we like it or not, the ancestors of much of the culture in which we live today. I don’t think it makes sense to either blindly believe all it contains or ignore it and it’s truly foolish to determine one’s position on the book based on being in opposition to some other group. The more we learn about our history, our anthropology our (dare I say?) evolution, the more light we have by which to re-read the text.

But this isn’t about the Bible. It’s about the cavemen. Last week’s New Yorker has an article by Judith Thurman about the Paleolithic cave paintings in southern France and northern Spain. (If you think people have diverging opinions about the Bible, don’t even get started on the New Yorker or the French.)

The article notes that recorded history began with the development of writing around 3200 B.C. Since then, there have been about 200 generations (if a generation is defined as 25 years). The current state of our knowledge holds that the number of generations between the rise of Homo sapiens and the development of writing was 6,000. I had to put the magazine down for 15 minutes while I got my head around that one. Two hundred generations since we first started writing and six thousand generations before that. I held up my forefinger and thought, “This is now.” I held my thumb two inches away. “This is the earliest writing.” I held up my other forefinger and said, “If that span equals 200 generations, then modern man emerged…..” my other finger stopped when it was 60 inches – or five feet – away. Try it, if you’ve got the armspan for it.

I managed to stop gawking at my fingers and turned back to the article. Two pages later, Ms. Thurman writes that the style, colors and methods of Paleolithic art did not change for 25,000 years. Same horses, same rhinos, same bison over and over again. She quotes an expert in Paleolithic art as saying that conservatism in art – the lack of change – is a hallmark of a “classical civilization.” “For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history,” she writes, “the culture it served, [Gregory Curtis] concludes, must have been ‘deeply satisfying’ – and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.”

I had to lay the magazine aside again and with it, my prejudicial assumption that civilization gets better as the millennia pass. Maybe the men didn’t drag women around by the hair; maybe Thomas Hobbes was wrong about life being “nasty, brutish and short.” If lack of change in 250 centuries of cave art meant life then was “deeply satisfying” what does it say about our churning culture today?

And then it hit me. Humans lived in a stable, deeply satisfying culture for a long time and then things started to change. The change may not have begun with the development of writing, but writing no doubt accelerated it. Writing allows us to keep knowledge somewhere other than inside our heads; the printing press and the microchip expanded that capacity enormously.

What we seem intent to know, mostly, is the difference between ourselves and other people and the catalog of reasons why we don’t like those others. We know we’re good and they’re evil, because we now know the difference between good and evil. It was that knowledge, the Bible says, that got us kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

The Biblical story tells of the creation of man and woman. It says they lived in the garden and it tells how they were expelled. It doesn’t say how long they lived in the garden. Because this information is omitted, it always seemed to me like they were only there a week or two before they screwed up.

Now, having read the New Yorker, I wonder if men and women were perhaps in the garden for 25,000 years, painting on the walls of the caves and all getting along pretty well. Then some of them began to think they were good and some of the others were evil and so they stopped painting. And started writing.

© Mark Floegel, 2008