Above: Paintings depicting exploits on the battlefield and in the bedroomULM, GERMANY--A team of archaeologists from Arizona State University has unearthed what it believes to be mankind's first blog, a series of cave paintings depicting critiques of other cave paintings made by more virile, popular cavemen. The discovery was made during a routine survey of the Hohle Fels caves in southern Germany, and promises to revolutionize theories on the earliest days of human communication.
"I've never seen anything like this," declared expedition leader Dr. Timothy Frick. "This is an unprecedented collection of hamhanded social commentary mixed with clearly exaggerated claims of achievement.
Discovered by a handful of graduate students and faculty, the paintings depict, among other things, the daily adventures of an unusually creative hunter-gatherer from the Upper Paleolithic era, or about 40,000-10,000 years B.C.E. What separated this discovery from others is the nearly exclusive self-aggrandizing nature of the artwork.
One set of paintings depicts the artist, distinguished in all representations by his elevated stature and elongated phallus, atop a pile of roughly two dozen presumably female figures with long, flowing hair and physically improbable breasts. Another shows the same figure slaying several beasts, including a mastodon, lion, giant centipede, and what appears to be a winged dragon with two-headed sharks for feet.
Several experts, having examined photographs of the cave, were quick to vouch for both their authenticity and importance. Lars Brackbun, chief archaeologist at the University of Bonn, explained the community's enthusiasm.
"History is replete with lords, kings and holy men eager to record their exploits for posterity. Traditionally, this has been an effort to solidify their reputations as demigods or instruments of the divine. However, to find evidence of what appears to be as common a human as you might find at the time engaged in the same activity, well, that's something else entirely. And that is before one takes into account the childish criticism of other cave paintings and the ignorant etchings about the decisions of the tribal elders."
"Look here, this appears to be some sort of prehistoric feline playing a musical instrument in a fashion meant to be mocking this secondary depiction of a caveman who has seemingly fallen down," an excited Brackbun pointed out. "Simply fascinating!"
Indeed, based on previous excavations and fossil research, most of the slain animals in the paintings didn't exist in this region at the time, while others were blatant fabrications. Additionally, the team found no evidence of any of the large beasts having been consumed in the cave.
"If he'd actually killed and eaten any of these things, we'd have found the bones," explained Dr. Frick. "We found plenty of rabbit skulls and a few calcified snake carcasses, not to mention what must have been an unhealthy number of acorns smothered in a primitive cheese curd, but not much else. Nor was there any evidence of the tool-making prowess that would have been required to kill anything larger than the common household dogs of today."
One significant oddity was a large pile of what initial testing has determined is a pile of wadded up leaves with approximately 5 milliliters of solidified protein deposits at the center. While Frick has yet to determine what was contained at the center of these deposits, he ventured the guess that, "Our subject most likely spent a great deal of time in the cave. Alone. In fact, near as I can tell, this area of the cave seems to be in the back section of a larger dwelling populated by what evidence leads us to believe were normal, more productive members of the epoch."
These paintings are just one of the many new and startling discoveries to be found in the caves. In an adjacent cave, a team of researchers from MIT found what they believed to be a community set of paintings depicting a first-person narrative in which various tribal members would paint depictions of themselves singing songs poorly, playing musical instruments poorly, and other various situations in which they were generally made to look like asses.
In an area to the north, teams from Stanford unearthed small, short-form paintings of what team members called, "the most banal and mundane activities one could imagine, depicted in the most artless and boring way possible. We were given the impression that these were painted and exhibited almost as soon as these trite, uninteresting events happened."
"What we are seeing here is some of man's most primitive forms of this species' need to embarrass, brag, boast, and publicize the most basic details, thoughts, and opinions that occurred in their tiny, unimportant, brutally short lives," explained Dr. Brackbun.
"It seems that some of our most cherished internet applications are just the most technologically advanced method of expressing these primal inklings that evolution lodged in our reptilian brains for some reason. What an exciting development."
"Well, maybe not exciting," Brackbun corrected himself. "But it's a development and you can't deny that. Is it our fault all the good discoveries were made decades ago? No. Fuck off if you don't like it then."
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