Word: caving
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Humans, true, have tried to evade or minimize risk ever since man first ducked into a cave to elude the sabertooth. Ancient Babylonia invented marine insurance, but notoriously litigious Americans have always wanted more than mere insurance. As soon as the automobile became popular, the motoring public began to develop what San Francisco Liability Lawyer Scott Conley calls the belief that "there must be a pot of gold at the end of every whiplash." Now the old litigious spirit has become almost a reflex. Malpractice suits against doctors are epidemic. The volume of damage suits, doubling in some jurisdictions...
...writer Arthur Clarke presented ape men who evolved, in part, by murdering those of their neighbors who had not yet learned to use clubs. Cartoonists gave us Fred Flintstone and his pet dinosaurs. The epic movie One Million B.C. offered a grunting Raquel Welch dodging various prehistoric beasts and cave men with something more than evolution on their minds...
Stone tools, cave paintings and burial sites have provided glimpses of our immediate ancestors. But how did habilis live? The fossil record, notes Leakey, provides a skeleton key. But the lifestyles of primates, and of such modern-day primitives as the Kung and the Eskimos, offer more elaborate clues. For one thing they suggest that the existence of earlier man was not, as previously supposed, nasty, brutish and short. Gatherer-hunters, says Leakey, led a shrewd, uncompetitive life and spent little time on the hunt. What truly separated them from their relatives the chimps and baboons, however, was not their...
...huge house. Its 32 rooms were filled with tapestries and wood carvings. In an enormous library with shelves from floor to ceiling, he could curl up and read Dickens and Stevenson and Tom Swift. Best of all, tucked in a corner of the garden was a little cave where Jay used to sit for hours and imagine that it had once belonged to King Arthur. In the evening, he and his family discussed literature, and sometimes Jay made up stories for them...
Marshack, a former science writer who has devoted 15 years to paleolithic studies, has suggested even bolder ideas. In his writings, notably The Roots of Civilization, he says that what looks like random scribbling on cave walls and even on some artifacts may actually represent many different symbol systems. These could have been used to record the passage of the seasons and astronomical observations and to indicate periods of rituals and ceremonies. If these controversial yet hardly dismissable ideas are correct, Cro-Magnon man may well have been experimenting with the precursors of writing, arithmetic, calendar making and other "civilized...