My recent dip into the dating pool has lead me to Cro-Magnon Man. During college, I found anthropology a dull study. but I could not blame my professor for my lousy experience. My expectations were unrealistic. I expected anthropology to include a hot professor, in a great pair of Gap Chinos, looking all sexy in a wool, felt Fedora gallivanting off on wild adventures in far away, exotic lands. You know, the whole Indiana Jones package. I am certain half of the women in my class signed-up for the same reason and were equally disappointed. I ended up dropping anthropology when my professor was called away on a dig, returned two weeks later and never mentioned what happened on his travels. In class, he went straight back to the text book picking up from where we left off. When I raised my hand and asked him what happened on his travels, he said that it did not pertain to our area of study and returned to carbon dating and the importance of accuracy in blah blah blah. I calmly gathered my things, walked out of his class and headed to the registrar's office to drop him like it's hot. No need to waste my time. College was not where my education of Cro-Magnon Man started.
My education about Cro-Magnon Man came from the William Penn Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the mid-1970's, I was fortunate enough to be pulled along on my mother's spiritual quest. This adventure took my sisters and I through many christian based religions. Luckily, early on her quest she stumbled upon Transcendental Meditation (TM) mostly because the Beatles were into it and my mom was a smoking, hot, momma living life on the cutting edge. So no matter what kind of Jesus activities we had going on, we meditated twice daily for twenty minuets, like it or not.
A typical Sunday for my sisters and I included waking up, meditating, rushing to get out of the house to go see Jesus somewhere, then off to a Sunday lunch with relatives or maybe Wendy's then hurrying to the downtown museum where they played free classic movies in an beautifully decorated ornate old stadium seating theater. Mother loves the movies and we were given the choice to either roam the museum or watch the movie, but she was not to be disturbed until after the movie ended. Sometimes I stayed to watch whatever was playing, especially if it was in Technicolor, but typically, I chose to roam the museum.
It was a great place for a curious young girl on a rainy Sunday afternoon. My adventures started on the top floor and I worked my way down. There was a full planetarium up there and I loved watching the latest show. That feeling of being in that big, round room reclined in a springy seat, watching the afternoon sky slowly turn to twilight then dusk with the rising stars and the skies softly becoming midnight blue and the comic book drawings of Orion and Sagittarius projected in the distance, and if I squinted just so, I swear could almost believe how those tiny white lights in the domed ceiling could really be Leo the Lion and Gemini the Twins. The deep voiced audio of the shifting cosmos was almost like the voice of God showing me the path of the Universe. This was my quiet, happy place. My place of imagination and vision of where we really come from and what was it all about? The Universe seemed so vast and mysterious it left great space for considering other possibilities and philosophies.
After the show I would roam the lower three floors of dusty, aging exhibits of our great Pennsylvania history from the beginning of time, including Neanderthal Man and all his friends. I spent more time looking at the stuffed Lynxes than the heavily muscled upper-body of the subspecies to our known modern humans. While I found the fashion appealing (don't get me started on how turned on I get from a man in a skirt! Thank you Utility Kilt for your catalog!), the setting I found uninspired. Some dusty caves and fire pits, a few rocks thrown around here and there. Not as interesting as the planetarium, but it all can't be comic book cut-outs and booming voices.
Those countless hours in the museum taught me a few things about the human man (my favorite topic!) and I am honored to share my knowledge. Cro-Magnon Man is the variety of pre-humans who come from Central Europe and the most highly evolved of the Neanderthal Man from which we all are descendants of unless if you are a devout christian and you do not believe in evolution so it is highly unlikely that you will have stuck around this long to pipe in your hocus pocus creation story.
Anthropologists believe that their port of entry was near Romania. This location interests me now since I tend to date men mostly from a European descent. Many of the female skull remains are riddled with skull fractures implying the Cro-Magnon man was perhaps responsible for these injuries. Cro-Magnon Man was thought to have a temper and have violent rages, thus the image of the woman being dragged off by her hair is a common image in many people's mind. If more stair cases were found within the cave dwellings or even ladders like the Anasazi Indians had in their cliff dwellings, then tripping and falling down the stairs would have been a more obvious conclusion. But the cold hard fact remains that the female Cro-Magnon probably talked too much.
That has not yet been properly documented, but it is cocktail conversation somewhere on some college campus.
Cro-Magnon Man has a temper and he's gotten a bad reputation. The cold hard fact is that Cro-Magnon man is misunderstood. To his credit, he had a large brain which made him feel very smart. Cooked food remains have been found between teeth suggesting the ability to use tools and fire with intended knowledge. Some scientist believe that the remains that are buried with necklaces implies that Cro-Mag held ceremony and may have had knowledge to natural healing. And it is also believed that there was a lot of in breeding.
Poor Cro-Mag is just a victim of his circumstances.
What does all of this have to do with me and dating?
Plenty.
So much love,
All the way from over here...
XOL
My education about Cro-Magnon Man came from the William Penn Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In the mid-1970's, I was fortunate enough to be pulled along on my mother's spiritual quest. This adventure took my sisters and I through many christian based religions. Luckily, early on her quest she stumbled upon Transcendental Meditation (TM) mostly because the Beatles were into it and my mom was a smoking, hot, momma living life on the cutting edge. So no matter what kind of Jesus activities we had going on, we meditated twice daily for twenty minuets, like it or not.
A typical Sunday for my sisters and I included waking up, meditating, rushing to get out of the house to go see Jesus somewhere, then off to a Sunday lunch with relatives or maybe Wendy's then hurrying to the downtown museum where they played free classic movies in an beautifully decorated ornate old stadium seating theater. Mother loves the movies and we were given the choice to either roam the museum or watch the movie, but she was not to be disturbed until after the movie ended. Sometimes I stayed to watch whatever was playing, especially if it was in Technicolor, but typically, I chose to roam the museum.
It was a great place for a curious young girl on a rainy Sunday afternoon. My adventures started on the top floor and I worked my way down. There was a full planetarium up there and I loved watching the latest show. That feeling of being in that big, round room reclined in a springy seat, watching the afternoon sky slowly turn to twilight then dusk with the rising stars and the skies softly becoming midnight blue and the comic book drawings of Orion and Sagittarius projected in the distance, and if I squinted just so, I swear could almost believe how those tiny white lights in the domed ceiling could really be Leo the Lion and Gemini the Twins. The deep voiced audio of the shifting cosmos was almost like the voice of God showing me the path of the Universe. This was my quiet, happy place. My place of imagination and vision of where we really come from and what was it all about? The Universe seemed so vast and mysterious it left great space for considering other possibilities and philosophies.
After the show I would roam the lower three floors of dusty, aging exhibits of our great Pennsylvania history from the beginning of time, including Neanderthal Man and all his friends. I spent more time looking at the stuffed Lynxes than the heavily muscled upper-body of the subspecies to our known modern humans. While I found the fashion appealing (don't get me started on how turned on I get from a man in a skirt! Thank you Utility Kilt for your catalog!), the setting I found uninspired. Some dusty caves and fire pits, a few rocks thrown around here and there. Not as interesting as the planetarium, but it all can't be comic book cut-outs and booming voices.
Those countless hours in the museum taught me a few things about the human man (my favorite topic!) and I am honored to share my knowledge. Cro-Magnon Man is the variety of pre-humans who come from Central Europe and the most highly evolved of the Neanderthal Man from which we all are descendants of unless if you are a devout christian and you do not believe in evolution so it is highly unlikely that you will have stuck around this long to pipe in your hocus pocus creation story.
Anthropologists believe that their port of entry was near Romania. This location interests me now since I tend to date men mostly from a European descent. Many of the female skull remains are riddled with skull fractures implying the Cro-Magnon man was perhaps responsible for these injuries. Cro-Magnon Man was thought to have a temper and have violent rages, thus the image of the woman being dragged off by her hair is a common image in many people's mind. If more stair cases were found within the cave dwellings or even ladders like the Anasazi Indians had in their cliff dwellings, then tripping and falling down the stairs would have been a more obvious conclusion. But the cold hard fact remains that the female Cro-Magnon probably talked too much.
That has not yet been properly documented, but it is cocktail conversation somewhere on some college campus.
Cro-Magnon Man has a temper and he's gotten a bad reputation. The cold hard fact is that Cro-Magnon man is misunderstood. To his credit, he had a large brain which made him feel very smart. Cooked food remains have been found between teeth suggesting the ability to use tools and fire with intended knowledge. Some scientist believe that the remains that are buried with necklaces implies that Cro-Mag held ceremony and may have had knowledge to natural healing. And it is also believed that there was a lot of in breeding.
Poor Cro-Mag is just a victim of his circumstances.
What does all of this have to do with me and dating?
Plenty.
So much love,
All the way from over here...
XOL
6 comments:
So beautifully written. Thanks for the wonderful memories of childhood. Yes, the William Penn Museum was a wonderland in our teens. I remember buying those little cherry hard candies that came in the round tin and riding the tall escalator up and down, over and over. I had totally forgotten about the movies - the main reason mom always wanted to go!
I don;t think I ever saw a single film in that museum. I remember the early Pennsylvania forest and the stuffed animals. BTW, Neanderthal man was a sub-species of the Homo-Sapiens we evolve from. There is some evidence of mixed bloodlines, but most modern-day people are Homo-Sapiens.
And....I'm pretty sure Mom had absolutely NO interest in the Beatles. The only reason she forced us to learn Transcendental Meditation was that she thought it would help us all lose weight. I'm so grateful for the lifelong practice, but her motives were flawed.
Love you.
All the way from out here.
L.
Very interesting, I love your writing. Sounds like a fun Sunday tradition!
I love good memories but still have no idea what this has to do with your current love life Linda. I don't care that you didn't share that, leave it to our imagination...Somehow, since getting to know your sisters better I don't think you got hit on the head and thrown over anyone's shoulder!
Glad Anne posted this for others to share.
Linda, I think you missed your calling...You should have been a writer. That was sooo awesomely written!! Love it!!
godbless the man who inspired this! You rule sista! Amen.
Homo sapiens sapiens produced some crazy art & awesome music, they produced some of the only Heavy Metal that I listen to. I dated one once. I was startled by his intellect & he was a monster in bed.
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