History's Greatest Clots

PRE-HISTORY

Living with Mastodons

Pre-history is the history before there was proper history; at least not much of any real interest. It is generally accepted that it started in the Rift Valley in South Africa. There was a bit going on in Australia, but as this was all upside down compared to Africa no one has ever paid much attention to it.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have learned a great deal about the people who lived in Africa all those hundreds of thousands, even millions of years ago. They even know the name of one such inhabitant–Lucy. At least that’s how the learned archeologists refer to the small collection of bones they found in the Ethiopian desert.

Some of the earliest human-like creatures were called Homo Erectus, presumably on account of their excessive fertility. Despite their fecundity they were not very securely constructed as evidenced by the large number of their assorted bits and pieces that are continually being found all over the area.

From these odds and ends expert scientists have been able to reconstruct life-like representations of these early forebears of humanity. They were short and stocky with necks like a rugby forward, long arms and jutting brows of similar pattern and incredibly hairy. This last attribute is entirely understandable as they had no tools apart from the odd bit of rock and absolutely no understanding of the finer points of personal grooming or Haute Couture. In other words, they were hopelessly and irredeemably uncivilized. They didn’t even have proper wars.

The theory goes that these primitive ancestors of humanity migrated all over the place. No reason has ever been advanced as to why they should have decided upon such a dramatic undertaking. One can only surmise. Perhaps it was decided that upon balance it was preferable

Cave painting from Image sur Mur Southern France.

Interpreted as depicting an early, if largely unsuccessful, attempt to domesticate a wild animal.

to risking freezing to death in Iceland rather than becoming a meal for a ravening tiger in Africa. On the other hand it may well have been because they were simply plain stupid and were continually getting lost. In any event they spread all over the place, changing their skin color and bodily configurations to suit their new surroundings.

It would seem reasonable to suppose that travelling towards the east with the sun continually in their eyes in order to colonize China caused them to screw up their eyes for a few hundred.

Drawing found on a rock wall, 5,000 meters up the Matterhorn. It puzzled the experts for years. Suggestions included: a phallic symbol, a blueprint for the first wheel and axle, and most imaginatively of all, an ideogram left by aliens showing a contoured plan of a nearby hill with a telescope to view the sun. Recently, Professor Engelbert Von Dumkoph of the University of Terra Del Fuego positively identified it as a representation of the launching of the first Stone Age boat.

thousand years thus accounting for them all having narrowed eyes upon arrival. Similarly it was, no doubt, due to the bleaching effect of the rain and snow that led to them to adopting a pinkish white color in the colder regions. The Red Indians, of course, lived in a less cold and somewhat dryer area and so had less of their original color washed out. After an incredibly long time some of these peripatetic nincompoops finally arrived at a place called Neanderthal. By now they looked rather different. This was hardly surprising after walking from the Rift valley to Germany. They must have found the area congenial as they remained there for thousands and thousands of years while slowly turning into modern humanity.

They were the first people to have a real sense of history for they were careful to leave huge numbers of incredibly awful drawings all over the insides of their caves, just to show posterity what revolting lives they led. These pictures, in the loosest sense of the term, were almost without exception depictions of extinct animals such as mal-formed oxen, deer, and mammoth. At least that is what the experts claim they represent. But as the Neanderthals’ sense of scale, let alone of perspective, appears to have been non-existent it is as good an explanation as any other.

They must have been exceptionally hard on their tools and household or cavehold equipment as broken bits of stone and bone, that the same aforesaid experts claim to be such items, are readily available from any well-authenticated site.

It is generally agreed among Neanderthal watchers that by now they were starting to look a bit more human having shed some of their hair, but as they then started to feel the cold they covered themselves up with animal skins so that the end result must have left them looking much the same, at least until they went to bed.

In order to obtain sufficient numbers of skins it was necessary for them to kill appropriate animals. That their intelligence had not kept pace with their depilation is evidenced by their choosing the mammoth, the largest of all available creatures, as their preferred provider of these necessities.

It must have required Herculean stupidity even to contemplate attacking the creatures when the only weapons, if that’s the right word, available were sticks and stones. Anyway they did, and thoughtfully left piles of mammoth parts to prove it. It was at about the same time that they discovered that mammoth was good to eat; much to their joy and the enduring discomfort of the animal kingdom ever since. It would seem likely that our forebears spent almost their entire time chasing large animals, throwing things at them and then chopping them up into bite-sized lumps. The mind boggles when considering how on earth they ever actually killed a mammoth. Even when stone tools became available in the Stone Age it must have been the equivalent of attacking a very large elephant with a toothpick.

The socially well-rounded Neanderthal man’s other main activity, pre-occupation one might almost say, seems to have been dragging women around by the hair preparatory to improving the blood-line by a, no doubt, horrendous level of in-breeding. Fortuitously, this was something that gradually reduced the jutting brow to dimensions that allowed the development of headgear and also permitted the chin and lower jaw to become decently receding. Here at last were fleeting signs of the dawning of civilization.

The equivalent of attacking a very large elephant with a toothpick.

Most reliable commentators agree that the intelligence level of these nincompoops was about that of a not over bright wombat and that as a result their discourse consisted almost entirely of assorted grunts and growls usually represented by ugh, ug, gog, gug, etc. To appreciate the extraordinary tenacity of this particular gene it is only necessary to attend a rugby match and listen to the participants in a scrum communicating or a marginally less depressing, but equally confirmatory milieu would be the public bar of any large tavern.

As our ancestors progressed through the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages not to mention the odd Ice Age or so, these rudimentary signs of civilization developed at an ever-faster rate. No sooner did somebody have the bright idea of dividing themselves into tribes than the first inter-tribal disputes arose and quickly progressed to something akin to a decent war.

Civilization was at hand. Indeed, humanity has never looked back. It is certainly to these innovators and intrepid but totally clueless ancients that we owe the whole basis of our present-day caring, egalitarian, and unselfish society. Indeed, so well did they lay the foundations that if one of them were to re-incarnate in the here and now he or she would undoubtedly feel perfectly at home, even if a little bewildered, at the total absence of mammoth meat in the population’s daily diet, and the entirely inappropriate length of most women’s hair.

All over the world other groups were, no doubt, behaving in much the same way as the Neanderthals, but the experts seem always to concentrate on the European theatre as one might say. Very probably to ensure that their incredibly boring books are assured a high volume of retail sales; if to no one else at least to numbers of their colleagues. These worthies are compelled to purchase every new tome as soon as it is published in order to be able to advance their own pet theories under the guise of a stinging critique. This keeps the publishing business in good heart and intra-discipline acrimony at a suitably petty level.

Ugette

There were no two questions about it; Ugette was the most beautiful woman in the whole tribe, all twenty-seven of them. Everyone agreed. The men were all besotted with her, and the other women all inordinately jealous.

What was even more remarkable than her beauty which was, to say the least of it, unusual was the fact that she was well past puberty and still a virgin; not, one might add through any lack of effort on the part of the male members of the tribe. Quite the reverse. Their commitment to the survival of the tribe had been heroic in the extreme. Particularly as it frequently had to be demonstrated in the disapproving presence of numbers of the female members.

After some months the situation had reached crisis point. The women were torn between their desire to hang on to their own males in the face of Ugette’s undoubted allure and the recognition of the fact that the sooner she had a man of her own, and succumbed decently to the appropriate hair-dragging rituals, the sooner would the males’ attentions be spread around more widely, thus providing them all with some welcome relief. The men, on the other hand, were rapidly becoming not only more and more frustrated, but deeply disheartened, seeing in their communal failure an almost lethal blow to their status and masculinity.

All in all for one reason or another emotions were running hot and stocks of mammoth meat and fire wood dangerously low, as the tribe’s attentions centered on the Ugette factor to the

almost total exclusion of hunting and house-keeping, let alone common sense. The atmosphere must have been not unlike the communal insanity that invests a population immediately prior to a modern day sporting spectacular.

The problem was not that Ugette was unwilling to participate in the appropriate rites of passage, quite the reverse. She made it abundantly clear that she would be delighted to play her expected role. Indeed, people were continually tripping over her as, ever hopeful, she assumed the customary supine position.

The trouble was that to all intents and purposes she was immovable. Not due to any deep-seated frigidity in her make-up, despite the lack of central heating in the cave, but simply and solely because she weighed around twenty five stone, large ones at that, or three hundred and fifty pounds, or approximately one hundred and forty kilos. Ugette was one big girl even by Stone Age standards, when men were men and women only too well aware of it. Various suggestions were made by all and sundry at both appropriate and inappropriate moments during the numerous male operational sorties. Some involved various marital aids

Ugette (left) and friend.

A computer enhanced etching executed on a mastodon’s toenail. From the collection of Colonel Barking-Madly whose grandfather found it in an imported barrel of sauerkraut.

such as wooden levers and props, while others called for the institution of a ménage a trois, or quatre or even cinque, or however many it might take to shift her. It was unthinkable, indeed, so unthinkable that any relationship could be truly meaningful let alone productive of offspring without prior indulgence in hair dragging, that no one had such a thought.

All efforts were concentrated upon the one key question, how to find any one male capable of shifting Ugette’s considerable poundage on his own, unaided and preferably, though not essentially, without the resultant linear strain proving too much for the initiate’s hair-roots or the prospective groom’s lower lumbar vertebrae, or even more importantly his ability to play his part in the production of the next generation of Ugs.

It was the clan’s leader Og the Strong, washing facilities were regrettably few and far between, who had the brain wave. One day, when out mammoth hunting with the rest of the able-bodied males there came a pause in the chase. The hunters sat and stared at the mammoth and the mammoth stood and returned the favour. It was at this precise moment that Og suddenly became aware of the extraordinary similarity between their quarry and the immovable Ugette. True, the latter might have a slight edge over the beast when it came to the matter of hirsuteness, but on the whole the likeness was remarkable. It was then that Og displayed the first recorded example of truly lateral thinking. So lateral in fact that it quite threw him and he had to sit down while he developed his revolutionary thesis.

No one person could possibly kill a mammoth all on his own, and yet no matter how many hunters took part or whether it was dispatched by wooden spears or stone axes or just judiciously hurled lumps of rock, the meat always tasted just as good. What really mattered was knocking off the mammoth, not the means. Could it be the same with Ugette?

It took Og a long time to get his thoughts into any sort of order despite the fact that their total on a good day would barely have made double figures, but at last he felt confident enough to broach the subject at the conclusion of the evening meal. Og may not have been all that bright, but even he