Steak - Mark Schatzker [31]
Denis Tauxe was almost done with his steak. In broken but usable French, I articulated my theory, ending on the thought that the biggest animals painted on the walls at Lascaux were the most delicious ones. He wasn’t buying it. He countered, explaining that in some caves you find paintings of abstract shapes, which are neither edible nor delicious. He warned me not to take a painting of an aurochs too literally. The caves, he said, do not depict “the everyday” and rarely feature representations of the weapons that did the killing, just the animals themselves. I parried, pointing out that modern hunting lodges are much the same: you see the heads of deer, elk, moose, and so forth mounted on their wood-paneled walls, but rarely will you find a Remington Model 700 BDL mounted next to them.
With an air of finality, Tauxe declared, “You can represent Christ without eating Christ.”
“That’s true,” I replied, and we both sat there in silence for a few seconds until I was struck by the obvious and ironic flaw in what he had just said. “But people do eat Christ,” I said, pointing out that good Christians eat his body and his blood on a weekly basis. Tauxe laughed—briefly—but was unswayed. The steaks were finished. Across the street, cows were still grazing.
The roads near Lascaux are old. Not Paleolithic old, mind you, but old enough that they’re not bound by the straightedge of some government planner. They wind through forests and next to rivers, and burst suddenly and gloriously over the crests of hills where you can catch panoramic snapshots of the up-and-down. More than 250,000 people visit Lascaux every year, and spillover demand has helped other Stone Age tourist attractions take root. I stopped in at Préhisto Parc, where an open-air walking tour takes visitors past dioramas of Neanderthals and prehistoric humans killing animals. Neanderthals are typically cast as the inveterate morons of the prehistoric world, but Préhisto Parc sheds light on their superb skill as hunters. They were intelligent enough to invent the bola, which they twirled above their allegedly crude-looking heads and hurled at the legs of stampeding prey, which, after tumbling into the ground, were speared. Dorothée Drucker conducted some isotope analysis on Neanderthal bones and found that they were, as she put it to me, “hyper carnivores,” eating everything from woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth to deer, horses, aurochs, and reindeer. Some believe they ate almost as much meat, proportionally speaking, as cats, and if so they must have had livers that could handle such massive amounts of protein. A Neanderthal pang of meat hunger is something a modern human cannot conceive, though it is nevertheless fun to try.
I came upon one diorama of a Stone Age human with a dead rabbit slung over his shoulders entitled The Hunter Returns with a Hare, though it could have easily—and more accurately—been called If This Hunter Doesn’t Watch It, He’s Going to Give Himself Protein Poisoning or Good Luck Getting Laid with That Pathetic Amount of Lean Meat. Farther on, a sign addressed the prehistoric fondness for cave art by announcing: “The main motivation for this seems to have been the symbolic and not the aesthetic dimension.” The aloof tone and fixation on the metaphysical seemed, once again, characteristically French. How the hell do they know it was symbolic? I mumbled to myself, more convinced than ever that the images at Lascaux were—at least in part—some early version of the still life,