Meaning, Schmeaning

I don't know why this has to be so complicated. The meaning of life is life. Ipso facto, case closed. It's the meaning of death that's complicated. We know that we are alive, and our natural instincts tell us that we should try to stay alive as long as possible. Then there are the people who commit suicide, but that's not normal, that's an aberration. I can understand somebody who is in a lot of pain wanting to end it all, although most of them don't. I suppose being mentally ill is a lot like being in pain, so maybe that's it. Most of us, though we might bitch and complain about it, still prefer life to death.

I don't know how long man has been contemplating his own mortality. We're pretty sure that the early Hebrews didn't worry about it all that much but, at some point, they started anticipating a mass resurrection when all the dead would rise up and go vote for Mayor Daley, or something like that. After that still hadn't happened centuries after it had been predicted, people began to shift their focus to their own personal afterlife, which they supposed would be in Heaven, not on Earth as had been previously supposed.

Speaking of dead people voting, I saw on the news the other evening that some kind of audit was recently done and it was discovered that millions of dead people in this country are collecting Social Security and Medicare benefits. See, that's what happens when you let dead people vote, before long they are voting themselves all kinds of benefits. The next thing you know, they'll be running for congress, or even the presidency. Don't laugh, stranger things than that have happened!.....Now where was I?

Funny you should mention Jean Auel, I had forgotten her name, but she was indeed the author of the series I was talking about. Of course it was fiction, but I like my fiction to at least be plausible. The only part I remember that was patently absurd was the way she had one woman doing all those heroic things in one lifetime. That's probably why some of those old Biblical heroes lived for centuries, there was no way they could have done all the stuff the were supposed to have done in a normal lifetime. There was another series like that, but it was about Aleutian Islanders. This one was written by Sue Harrison, a Michigan girl. What she did was collect a bunch of Native American legends from the Pacific Northwest and then put her own spin on them. This one was almost too realistic for my taste, featuring a lot of gratuitous graphic brutality, but I found the other parts interesting. You're right, though, we don't really know a lot about Stone Age people, but we can speculate based on the evidence we do have.

I agree that shamans were probably more observant than the average cave dweller. They also would likely score pretty high on a modern I.Q. test, providing that it was adjusted for cultural differences. They must have passed their accumulated knowledge on to apprentices before they died, and the data base grew from one generation to the next.  They didn't have writing yet, so they organized the data into stories and chants to make it easier to remember and teach to others. That might also have been the purpose of those cave paintings, although they could just as likely have been the product of unemployed artists with too much time on their hands.

I think they had a sense of morality in those days, although it was probably different from ours. They were probably more communal than we are today, so the focus would be on cooperation and sharing. They may have believed that good behavior would get them into the Happy Hunting Grounds when they died, but it's just as likely that the more imminent prospect of being banished from the tribe for their sins would provide sufficient incentive for them to walk the straight and narrow path. People must have screwed up occasionally, just as they do today, so there would have to be some way they could repent and redeem themselves. If they kicked everybody who screwed up out of the tribe, there eventually would not have been enough hunters left to bring down those hairy elephants, or enough women folks to cook them.