Lascaux

Lascaux

Yesterday's screen-shot on my search engine, Bing, was of the 17,000-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux in southern France. (Bing has stunning screen-shots almost every day, by the way.) I went on a hunt for information about the caves, and found this link to an excellent virtual tour (click "visite de la grotte"), then got distracted before I'd checked many of the other links. When I tried again this morning, a lot of new articles came up about some old "Life" photographs of the painting that recently re-surfaced, which I suppose was what inspired the folks at Bing to feature Lascaux yesterday.

These renderings of a horse and a bull have been among my favorites for years. I always wondered: was the artist a natural? What did his tribesmen think of his skill? Was everyone brought up to try his hand at this beautiful work?

This fanciful site about "Atlantean Man" in pre-Columbian North America suggests that I am a descendant of the Cro Magnons who made these paintings:

Comprehensive studies of blood types also show that Mayans, Incas and Auracanians are all virtually 100% group O, with 5-20% of the population being rhesus negative. This was the blood type of the original Europeans and stems from Cro-Magnon man (Kurlansky, 2001). The races that possess this blood type are races of the Americas, the Canary Islands, the Berbers, the Basques, and Gaelic Kelts.

Like both my parents and (necessarily) both my sisters, and like about 7% of the population, I have O-negative blood. I am in fact a hotbed of recessive traits, including straight blonde hair, absence of a widow's peak, blue eyes, lack of dimples, and thin lips. (On the other hand, my chin is not cleft, I can roll my tongue, I am not color blind, my earlobes are of the "detached" shape, and I am not susceptible to poison ivy.)

Get ready for a roller-coaster ride if you do a search of "Cro Magnon" plus "O-negative blood type." The Net is stuffed to the rafters with eccentric theories about the mystical meanings of bloodtypes. There's a special diet, for instance, keyed to what your bloodtype tells you about whether you are essentially more paleolithic or agrarian.

The author of this strange O-Negsite believes that Rh-negative blood is an "angelic trait, passed to us by the Watchers." She lists some fascinating traits we O-neg types have in common. "Low blood pressure," check. "Love of space or science," OK, I'll go with that. "ESP," "unexplained scars on body," "sense of not belonging to the human race," "extra rib or vertebra," and "capability to disrupt electrical appliances" -- hmmm. I believe I've mentioned my alienation issues, and I did have a watch repairman claim once that my wrist was exerting an electromagnetic influence that accounted for his failure to fix the problem. I can't swear I don't have any extra ribs or vertebrae, but I'm pretty sure I lack inexplicable scars. Unless they're being hidden from me.

Chasing down links from this and similar sites reveals related theories, such as that the Basque people were Starchild-like invaders who started the whole O-negative Cro Magnon thing, including not only cave paintings but standing stones like Stonehenge. Or that Quetzalcoatl was an early Viking survivor whose energetic procreation explains why native Central Americans also have an unusually high incidence of O-negative blood. There's also something about "Reptilians" that I can't quite get a handle on, though it shows up often.

Gotta go. A large monolith has appeared outside, and has sent a message to my reptilian O-negative blood that is urging me to go make some cave paintings.