Pause for a moment to glance backward in time and think about the astonishing world of our most primitive forebears. In this blog post, we lead you on a venture through the severe embodiment of life in the prehistoric period and the multitude of experiences had by our cave-dwelling ancestors. The lives of these long-gone beings were a mixed bag of direct resilience, pure moxie, and nature all around them.
From the first light of dawn, spreading across wild, huge terrains, early men lived, worked, and died, and long before any semblance of an organized society had appeared, their ghostly figures carved something resembling home out of the sublime natural world. Those figures had no tools, no fire, no basic recipe to follow – just imagination and brute strength. Wood was probably the first material they used to fashion resemblances of the basic units of anything we might call a structure. What protected those units from the elements surely wasn’t what you’d call shelter by today’s standards.
Cavemen's forms of artistic expression were far more advanced than the simple survival methods needed to produce the rudimentary tools they used. Something deep within them compelled them to record, time and time again, the "living mandala" of their very existence.
Painting at such a primal level was probably as vital for the maintenance of personal sanity, and for nurturing the very community in which they lived, as were the acts of hunting and gathering that kept them fed.
Survival techniques evolved over the ages. Gathering food on a daily basis, performing meticulous hunting, and sharing resources in the household sphere are what one usually assumes to be the cooperative highlights of a society like ours today. What almost never gets mentioned is the myriad of natural challenges our ancestors dealt with daily and the number of ways, both simple and complex, that they found to overcome these otherwise life-stopping events.
The way of life of these ancient predecessors offers us more than one glimpse into their existence. It permits a look at their ingenious use of tools; their incredible foraging and hunting talents; and their clever, often together, construction of interiors—in short, their homelike conditions. We can learn a lot from these people, not just since their lives were not so very far back in the history of humans but also because in many ways they set the stage for the lives we modern humans live today.