Conversations with Cavemen

What would you like to talk about in my hypothetical afterlife?

A cave on Easter Island, 2015.
Photo by Michelle Teheux

I like to imagine the conversations I’d have with a hypothetical caveman (well, cavepeople, but I don’t know how progressive those folks were) or with an alien interested in understanding Earth life. I also like to think of the conversations I’d have with whoever was the lady of the house when my home was first built in 1897.

Probably this has to do with my life-long fascination with anthropology, and that probably comes from my life-long feeling that I’m living in an alien culture. Even as a small child, I felt there were things everyone else seemed to understand that I didn't. I remember sitting around a table with some of my classmates in third grade thinking, “Perhaps one of these days they’ll take me aside and announce they’re going to let me in on the secret.”

Maybe you’ve had similar feelings. Maybe you’ve felt joy and relief on the rare occasions you’ve met another person who gets you. Or maybe you’ve always felt like you fit right in and your culture is perfect; if so, this piece probably isn’t for you.

I was explaining to my son my idea for a story about a roomful of people from radically different cultures and time periods having a chat in a hypothetical afterlife.

“Imagine the caveman trying to understand the world view of, say, a French existentialist,” I suggested. “Or of a modern-day feminist. Would they be able to understand each other’s thinking at all?”

My son whipped out his best pseudo-intellectual English accent and said, “What are you talking about? I’ve had 30,000 years to think about this.” And there went that idea. It hadn’t occurred to me that a caveman with many thousands of years in my imagined Afterlife Salon would have had plenty of time to converse with all kinds of people and develop a possibly more modern world view.

A human without culture is like a computer without software. Most of what we think is self-evident is just something we picked up from our culture, but we tend not to understand that. (I highly recommend The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich if you want to really explore how different cultures shape the humans who live in them.)

Imagine an alien asking you to explain why certain harmful substances are legal and other less-harmful substances are illegal, or why people born on one side of an imaginary line are denied rights that are lavished on others who happen to be born on the other side. Or why we’ve designed a winner-take-all system in which a few people have more riches than they and their descendants could spend in a thousand years while others will work hard for decades and barely be able to keep themselves alive. It doesn’t take long to realize that much of our daily lives is built on nonsensical theories.

I also like to think about the woman who cooked in my kitchen and slept in my bedroom a hundred-plus years before I came along. I can just see her in her corset and bustle, holding up her skirt as she rushed down the stairs to invite a visitor into the parlor. Maybe she gave birth in my room. Maybe she died there. What would she think of my microwave? Would she ask me why I bother to bake bread when there are hundreds of loaves for sale less than a block away? She probably didn’t bake just for fun.

What would any random woman from several hundred years ago think if she magically popped into my house and heard me bitching?

“Let me get this straight. You only had two children and both of them are still alive. Wow. I gave birth to eleven kids and buried four of them. You can summon hot meals to arrive at your door anytime you want. You know what I had to do to get a hot meal? I had to build up the fire and spend half the day cooking. Sometimes I had to butcher something first. Nobody just brought hot cooked meat to my door! And you eat fresh fruit all year and you don’t even have to grow it yourself. I didn’t have any damn strawberries in January. Sometimes in January I had a half-rotted apple I’d stashed in the root cellar, and I was glad to have it. You have a whole closet full of clothes and you didn’t have to sew any of them, and you wash them in that machine. I had to make my own clothes and wash them in the creek. That was a shit-ton of work, let me tell you. You can make your house warm or cool by twisting that dial on the wall. Well, we didn’t have a dial like that. Fires did a half-assed job of keeping us warm and in summer we just sweated our butts off. (Note: Yes, this random woman has adopted modern speaking patterns.) You have a special room where you can wash your body, even in winter, without hauling in buckets of water and having to heat them up. And you can relieve yourself without having to go outside or carry a bucket of waste around. Do you have any idea how much it sucked to have to run outside in the middle of the night and poop in a dark outhouse? You have all your teeth. Huh. I already lost half my teeth by your age. Hurt like a sonofabitch to pull them because unlike you, all I had was a belt of whisky before the surgeon yanked them. You have been able to travel to far-away places — and come back. You have music and entertainment available whenever you want it. Your husband isn’t allowed to beat you, even if you burn dinner or he’s had a bad day. Plus, you have Diet Coke.”

And then she’d ask me if I’m always happy and thrilled because I’m living in this time and place. I’d probably lie and say I was. 

My version of Heaven is just people chatting endlessly about interesting books and ideas. (My idea of Hell is similar, but with eternally boring sports chatter.) If Mrs. 1897 wants to know why I’m dissatisfied with my life now, one reason is because too many people around me would choose the Hell version.