Read Online Prehistoric Times by Eric Chevillard, Alyson Waters - Free Book Online Page B

hardly appreciate reading one version of history that differs too much from the ones he has already read and that all agree to such an extent that they form but one, the same good old story every time, the magnificent adventure, and so we can rest assured.
    Whereas we are sure of absolutely nothing when it comes to prehistoric times, we know nothing, or almost nothing. We are obliged to invent. There can be, as we’ve seen with the headless woman, contradictory interpretations of what the cave paintings mean, but it can also be tricky just to identify what they are supposed to represent and this gives rise to merciless arguments as well. I caught wind of a scuffle that lasted for years between Glatt and one of his colleagues, Professor Opole, over a partial profile of a quadruped. The former believed it to be a hornless caprine whereas his adversary saw in it an antlerless cervid. Insults were exchanged, the expertise of the one was challenged by the other, and vice versa, as were then the morals of their respective mothers and wives; they came to blows, slaps, fisticuffs, they rolled on theground, pulled each other’s hair, bit each other on the ear, split one another’s lips, gave each other black eyes, broke each other’s noses, attempted to strangle one another, smashed each other’s ribs, and finally the antlerless cervid was left for dead. And all that simply to clarify a single point of prehistoric times. Is not this period deserving of our attention?
    It begins, then, with the appearance of man, but this great moment is itself difficult to date: what was, among all these hominids, the first humanly successful humanoid, the fabulous apparition in question, the ancestor worthy of us? There have been so many approaches, so many sketches of the definitive – or presumed definitive – figure, so many projects that seemed to hold water abandoned a hair’s breadth from success, so many two-legged bodies, misshapen, heavyset, hunchbacked, plausible, so many skulls poised atop them – ovoid or rounded, flattened, receding, real heads made for hat-wearing, that were in the end sent packing; in sum, there were so many humanoid creatures before man, creatures that were no longer apes, or not yet apes, that it would be foolhardy to claim to be able to tell man apart from the others with any precision. Besides, these creatures did not disappear from one day to the next the minute exclusive and very selective humankind was picked out of the lot; life went on for them too, their own evolution continued, they long remained contemporaries of Homo sapiens sapiens , and – I know this hypothesis will upset those of my fellow creatures who are my superiors – they may even have survived him; my opinion is that we ourselves are today the descendants of a species related to and rival of the human species that was annihilated and whose prestige and privileges we have usurped and whose civilized manners we ape; lice know what they’re doing, so do I,everywhere I go I see only chimpanzees slogging away, and the more serious they are, the more ridiculous they are, dressed nonetheless as if they were men: religious, sentimental, domestic like men used to be, but awkwardly, brutally, unrelentingly carried away by their ape logic, exceeding all moderation, their smiles swallowed by grimaces, their gestures too brusque, and every word laboriously learned wasted in fits of rage. I am ready to defend this hypothesis as a true theory: we got rid of man, then took his place, and I can prove it: never would man, endowed with the aptitudes both to reason and to laugh, the latter to counteract the former, never would man thus enlightened have entered History.

 
    T HE RED thumbtack is preventing me from concentrating. I find it impossible to focus fully on the map, hypnotized like the rabbit trying to find its way through the puzzle-maze that quickly learns by heart the only route leading to its carrot, on the upper right of the page – just