(Image credit EU, Wikimedia Commons)
North America, 2024
The hole in the ground had a physical weight that bore itself upon me, despite what I knew on an intellectual level. A hole was the absence of matter, not the presence. But the hole led to a cave, and a cave is a biological system that operates on primordial, alien logic, the logic of an ecosystem that uses every iota of matter within it to survive, to prevent collapse. I was sure my younger companions—now unloading ropes, carabiners, headlamps, and the like from a beat-up dull red Subaru SUV—could tell how out of my depth I felt.
It is often the academic’s lot to leave the fieldwork of their youth behind and remain firmly seated in their Department Chair, but in truth even as a grad student I had never been on a dig farther than twenty miles away from the nearest Hilton. Things likely would’ve stayed that way, but for the day Ellie came to my office hours with a painted rock.
Ellie was the rare student that I knew personally, a human being rising from the sheafs of names on midterms. My classes tended to be smaller and rather poorly regarded by the student body; there is an archaeology specialist in our department that hosts classes of two hundred in the most famous ‘easy A’ course on campus, and I’m fairly sure I mostly got his befuddled runoff. Ellie, though, showed up to office hours once a week. She had an infectious enthusiasm for paleoanthropology—for most things, honestly—and a rare gift for actually seeing professors as people, as opposed to personal tyrants or television characters with no interior life. All of Ellie’s professors felt this genuine sweetness, and she stayed in touch with many of them well after graduation.
When Ellie burst into my office, I was grading papers over a can of cheap IPA beer: the beer was nearly as bad as the papers, and I was thinking that the student who had given me the brews to stock my minifridge would be sorely disappointed when I posted the grades online. The short, athletic woman nearly spun the door off its hinges as she came inside.
“Dr. Yasor! Thank god you’re still here!” she said.
I jumped and nearly fell over, which sent a pile of books cascading into a miniature avalanche, doorstopper tomes and reams of unbound text slipping into chaos. Ellie helped me re-stack the precarious tower, one of many, as I regained my composure.
“Please, Ellie, you’ve graduated. You can just call me Mr. Yasor.”
Ellie looked confused.
“Sorry, that makes no sense. Call me whatever the hell you want. How can I help you?”
People who live in the Common Era have never been my specialty.
“I’m so sorry to burst in like this, but, well, something you may not know is that after I graduated in the spring I got into recreational caving.”
“Okay.” This piece of information made sense given Ellie’s energetic personality and love of the unknown.
“And the Caving Society and I heard about this new place in the backwoods that had never been mapped, so we decided to go check it out and—”
“Sounds dangerous,” I interrupted.
“Whatever,” she said. “Anyway, this cave is deep, really deep. And just when we were about to turn back, we found this!”
And she handed me a stone, smooth and roughly palm sized, with concentric circles painted in dark blue, flaked but still remarkably visible. And that rock changed my life.
The next day I was up at dawn, khaki shorts complementing the only t-shirt that I had designed as a ‘workout shirt’ (which had to be at least ten years old), when a beat-up dull red Subaru SUV came to my driveway to pick me up. Ellie was in the backseat with two other young adults, an Asian woman and a white man, having respectfully left shotgun open for me, and the driver was another young man, tall with a blond-ish beard and manbun. The driver introduced himself as “Chris the Cave Guy” and told me he worked at a tech start-up as their “Social Media Dude”. Then he said:
“I usually call the Caving Society the Caving Polycule.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s like, we are all dating each other. But we aren’t exclusive, at least not when it comes to each other. We can’t date other people but we all…date each other,” he said.
“Okay, that’s fine,” I said.
The rest of the ride was pretty quiet.
And then we were there: an unnamed cave in a barely trekked piece of forest abutting a national park reserve. Ellie, Chris the Cave Guy, Dalton, and Yan all made their preparations in the natural manner of seasoned pros, customized outdoors backpacks filled with carefully stowed and arranged gear were handed out with military efficiency. I offered to carry the water, not really knowing what else to do, but Ellie told me everyone would just carry their own water, and then she handed me an extra pack, small but unexpectedly heavy.
The cave’s shouting maw opened into a very steep slope, steep enough that the young people looped one of the sturdy nylon ropes around an oak tree and started half-rappelling, half-walking backwards down into the blackness. Soon, there were four beams of light from headlamps jauntily making their way into the earth, and I knew it was my turn next.
I wrapped the nylon rope around my knuckles, screwed my courage to the sticking place, and took the plunge.
------------------------------
It was marvelous inside the cave: if this was fieldwork, maybe I had missed out these past decades.
Vast rooms, connected only by narrow crawlspaces, peaked and troughed like great sine waves through the earth, decorated by the sharper waves of stalactites and stalagmites. I am not sure I had ever actually seen a stalactite, or if I had I hadn’t paid it much mind. But now, the natural rock formation represented a deep fascination for me, a sort of fossil record that the earth itself was alive. The only light was our headlamps, meaning my world was confined to just a circle, a little blurred at the edges, representing a two-dimensional image of whatever I was looking at. It wasn’t enough. How I wished I could see the place fully lit!
My companions were likely a lot less awed than I was, but certainly retained their curiosity. Their value had been established beyond all doubt, however. The way through the caverns had been difficult, circuitous, and required a lot of rope work, in short it was something I never could have done alone. Traversing this world required specialized knowledge combined with modern technological conveniences—not mobile phones, but spring-loaded camming devices, extremely modern in the paleoanthropological sense of the word.
“Up here,” said Ellie. She clambered up a small escarpment, disappeared for a few moments, and returned with a rock in her hand. More stripes.
I followed her, with great effort, up the stone wall and onto the more level shelf. Once there, I saw something that would keep someone like me busy, working, and theorizing for the better part of a year. Painted rocks, just as Ellie had shown me, scattered about the floor. Some were striped, some had dots, some had shapes or patterns I couldn’t parse at once. Animals? People? Gods? Some were alone, others in haphazard piles. Could they have been stacked once? What was the original use of this space? My discovery process, long thought dead from disuse and neglect, was going into overdrive.
“For the love of God no one touch anything else,” I said.
Ellie immediately put down the rock she was holding gingerly just where she had gotten it from, which made me chuckle; Chris the Cave Guy dropped the one he was pawing, which did not make me chuckle. Dalton and Yan were out of sight, possibly having snuck off to be alone together.
All of that mattered little.
“Ellie, you said that this cave had never been mapped. What did you mean by that?”
“Just what I said, Dr. Yasor. Either no one has been here that left a record, or this entrance just opened up.”
The stones looked old indeed, and the paint both here and on the sample Ellie had shown me in my office was no modern graffiti. Rock art like this, simple doodlings that could have been made by anyone, is among the most primitive forms of human expression, and as such it can be found in paleolithic sites around the world. In some places, the stones could have been painted as the primary object, for decoration or ritual purposes. Sometimes, though…
“We need to go deeper,” I said. The others readily agreed.
We walked and clambered and crawled for ten more minutes, and then, on our hands and knees, we emerged into a high ceilinged room. I stood up, shined my light on a wall opposite the crawlspace, and was immediately back on my knees.
In some places, rock art is a byproduct of a larger artistic endeavor; children, or perhaps amateurs, might be allowed to practice using the master’s paint, while one or more uniquely talented individuals painted the walls. This cave was one of those places.
In multicolored splendor a vision to rival Lascaux was spread before me. Small and large depictions of animals, people, and abstractions of places or ideas roamed the walls in a kind of dance of pre-civilization. All that could be thought to encompass a paleolithic person’s life was on display: two people fought each other with long sticks; a person gathered wriggling animals from a source of water, basket of some sort in hand; six legged hybrid beasts cavorted through the air; people sat in front of one solidly drawn figure, who gesticulated wildly. The paintings looked old, but the style was scarcely similar to what had been found even among the oldest cave art in North America, such as that at Dunbar in Tennessee. But what was more, to a trained eye such as mine, the art almost appeared as if it had been touched up continually over time. Perhaps quite recently.
And then, from out of the darkness with no sound at all, a mostly naked man, skin pale, eyes small, hair hanging loose about his shoulder upon which was strapped a basket woven from the skin of small animals and within which he carried a club of bone, stepped into the circle of our flashlights casually, as though it were the most natural thing to do.
Ten years later
“I thank you for honoring my muawam with your hearth,” said Special Ambassador M’ne, the Zealot formulation bouncing thickly around the cavernous hall of the UN General Assembly. He spoke English, a nearly unimaginable feat made ordinary by his extraordinary surrounds, though he retained the distinct Zealot accent—a thick muttering, difficulty with hisses and plosives. It was hard to get over for laymen. A literal cave person talking in a way that so resembled generations of cultural associations around the shaping of the mouths of man’s Paleolithic past; linguists had put forward the theory that the Zealot language was actually finely tuned to reduce the distorting effect of echoes within their caves, but I knew it was just another cruel irony to add to history’s endless farce.
The special ambassador’s speech, like many of M’ne’s, was a polite plea from a people on the brink. I had known M’ne for ten years, ten years of turmoil in the world’s scientific and political community, ten years of roiling apocalypse for the Zealots, and I had never seen him anything but calm, unphased, communicating efficiently and with deference. He was a model hunter-gatherer, all told.
What happened in the cave system known now to the world as Hearth Cave (in slightly mangled translation—the Zealots of course had no word for cave, having forgotten eons before that they lived in one) was modern man’s First Contact event with our ancient ancestors. The Zealous People (again, in garbled translation) were descendants from one of the first waves of Eurasians to cross the Bering Land Bridge—evidence from their teeth putting to rest decades of paleoanthropological speculation about when such a crossing took place—and, for some reason lost to themselves, had spent the intervening millenia living short lives and dying cruel deaths within Hearth Cave. Theories on how this first came to be remain one of the most vigorously debated topics in zealotological departments throughout the continent. The circumstance itself is startling: there must have been a cave-in or other shifting of the earth that trapped a significant enough population inside in the first place, and then, through luck and human ingenuity, a stable biological system was established until another shift made the cave system accessible again thousands of years later.
The Zealot’s history and cultural mindset were very much born from this unique system. In terms of the latter, Zealous People were as a rule quiet, efficient, unflinching in the face of hardship or deprivation, and extremely averse to waste of any kind. Not to mention fanatically pious. The Zealous People defined themselves by their religion, a startlingly advanced system of shaman-priests who communed directly with a single god and served as the ultimate arbiters of the strict rules governing Zealot life. Decades past, there was a theory that the Neolithic inhabitants of the proto-city Çatalhöyük in Anatolia may have lived in one continuous state of religious ritual, holy observance directing their every ordinary action as they went about their daily struggle to survive, kneeling or bowing at the image of a carved bull god or Venus figure as they ate sheep meat in the dust. If that sounds like hell to you, avoid Hearth Cave at all costs. Gathering food, eating that food, building tools, and even sleeping were activities done alongside ritualized prayers, chants, and ways of movement, part of the grand tapestry of Zealot myth once woven anew every day.
Myth and history, if there’s a difference, came together easily for the Zealous People. The Zealots themselves seemed to take a somewhat cyclical view of events, perhaps in deference to the frequent collapses their small, fragile society would face in the pitch-black miles of their subterranean home: cave-ins, floods, incidents of overpopulation, and wars all composed the ends and beginnings of Zealot eras. They had dedicated oral historians (though all Zealots, by necessity, served more than one purpose in the cave), usually elderly females who, by the low orange glow of hearths lit with coal and bad-smelling animal pelt kindling, would tell their long tales every night to people of all ages. These stories, like all oral tradition, could be the echoes of something that happened before any of our recorded histories, or they could have happened only two or three generations ago. Especially with the Zealots, there was just no way to tell.
That the Zealots had wars, what would be more like brutal internecine feuds for a settled society, is evinced by these stories. The rise of kings, the campaigns of demigod trickster warriors who made the cave echo with their enemies’ screams, and even, in what was only the second known instance of pre-Columbian cannibalism among North American peoples, the ritualized eating of the hearts and livers of foemen, the organs said to contain the greatest concentration of one’s essence, or muawam. In short, only the middle period collapse of the Ancestral Pueblo had seen such chilling destruction and desecration. This fact soured some of the world’s more ignorant observers on the Zealots. Certain social media circles and grifter politicians had even discussed “solutions” to this perceived problem that laid bare the scarcely-forgotten reactionary spasms of white supremacist cultural assimilation tendencies, which added a new anxiety for liberals to chew on. In the light of such monstrous suggestions, the vast majority of voters, even educated ones, were able to stomach what came to the fragile world of the Zealots instead.
All that I just said represents massive scientific breakthroughs in a variety of fields. The Zealots were a ‘natural experiment’, in political science terms, and an incredible one at that. The development of their society and religion was a beautiful test case for sociologists, anthropologists, historians, economists, and theologists. Their existence itself and what they had built in the intervening thousands of years in Hearth Cave was catnip to paleoanthropologists like myself, along with paleo- specialists of all sorts. Biologists wanted to know about the symbiosis developed over generations between the Zealots and a type of subterranean rat, a startling new example of domestication and animal husbandry. Psychologists and neurologists wanted to know how living and dying in such a closed, low light environment affected the Zealous People’s psyche (profoundly, it turns out). Doctors and pathologists wanted to poke and prod and sequence and vaccinate. The linguistics world was turned on its head. Hearth Cave became a Mecca for each scientific community that felt they could somehow draw data out of the couple thousand Zealot people. World governments wanted to protect, destroy, exploit, or tax them. NASA wanted to study the Zealots to understand how mankind could one day send generation-bearing enclosed colony ships to distant stars. Writers wanted to record the Zealot’s stories, journalists wanted to record the writers and the scientists and the government men. Tourists wanted in. Conspiracy theorists wanted proof (of something, it varied). Children wanted to write their school papers on Zealots, and maybe even meet a Zealot one day.
Total system collapse. By setting foot into a pristine world, by simply overturning a few stones, Ellie and I brought about total system collapse. I haven’t seen her since, last I heard she moved to Australia. Prefers the caves there, I think.
The Zealots became very aware of the outside world, very fast. A few were killed by diseases they had no natural immunity to, though modern medicine ameliorated the worst of this, though a stomach-aching pathology they gave us caused bowel discomfort for a few years throughout North America. I was patient zero. A few were killed in an armed confrontation with police, man’s second, clumsier contact event. M’ne had told me once that the Zealous People had forgiven me and the rest of the world for bringing idiots with guns along with the team of scientists during the so-called “Expedition B”, but I doubted it. Plenty of Zealots stayed in the cave, lived in mockery of their old life under the light of fluorescent bulbs and camera flashes, little more than walking exhibits. Others had ventured out, gotten rolled up in activist movements, become day laborers, or married people from the outside. Perhaps their children would one day climb the crushing capitalist ladder, or become famous for a unique talent, or be the first Zealot master of fields such as computer science or chemistry that were completely unknown to their parents. But what was certain is that the Zealot way of life was long gone. Their religion, culture, and civilization died the moment I stepped into the cave.
And then there was M’ne. The Special Ambassador, the handsome (clean-shaven) face of a people and an international symbol. He dressed in a perfectly tailored suit, moved with confidence and grace, never ceded a point he did not want to cede. M’ne finished his speech in front of the General Assembly, a message from various indigenous communities on their support for a climate change initiative. He pointed out his people’s special relationship to the land, their knowledge that could be lost in a period of societal upheaval. He could’ve been a member of any North American tribal identity, and in a way that sickened me.
Afterwards, as was our tradition when I was in New York, M’ne and I went to one of the city’s finest dining establishments. M’ne was a known gastronome. He had once quipped to reporters that “Eating cave rat all one’s life makes a steak look like a king’s bounty,” a small joke that immediately became a slogan of intolerant online circles calling for Zealots to be assimilated into modern society. I never had the guts to ask him if he was bothered by that, though from some perspectives it seemed like the least of the cruelties done to his people.
M’ne’s private car had brought us to an expensive but vaguely generic New York restaurant that proclaimed itself ‘a pioneer in New American cuisine’. The ride over was nothing more than pleasantries as I lied to him about how profound I thought his speech was. The Zealot preened a little at my compliments, smoothing his stringy hair back on his pale balding scalp and explaining that the speech wasn’t quite the one he had hoped to give, but his partners couldn’t agree on certain fundamental principles when it came to green energy. He began to quietly expound, I zoned out as I thought about how I had once seen him speaking very chum-like to a big oil exec.
We sat down, M’ne ordered a bottle of red, and it only took one glass for my nose to be painted enough that I said something I usually wouldn’t.
“M’ne,” I said, looking down into my wine, “why do you associate the Zealot cause with other indigenous causes?”
The old Zealot seemed a little surprised by the question, but was enough of a career politician to answer it smoothly.
“Why, Dr. Yasor, of course the Zealots and other indigenous peoples of the world have much in common! We remember our traditional ways of life, for one, but more importantly we are affected by the same fundamental problems. A people’s right to their land, the oppression of the majority against a vulnerable minority, climate change—”
“The Zealots wouldn’t give a fuck about climate change if I had just left you in that cave!” I said. I realized that I was raising my voice, and I quieted myself a little before speaking again. “Your system, your perfect ecological system, could have survived another ice age!”
“Dr. Yasor,” M’ne said gently, “Our system was far from perfect. What we know now about caves shows us that the survival of my people was a miracle, not an inevitability. Besides, you can’t blame yourself for our problems. Someone would’ve found us, and we were lucky it was a man versed in paleolithic society.”
“You weren’t a paleolithic society,” I cut in. M’ne was dodging the question. “You were a modern society with a unique way of living. That is nothing like an indigenous people’s group that was chased off their land in the colonial period.”
“I’m not sure I see what you are getting at.”
“I’m saying that for these other groups, there is no going back. The Lakota’s land is gone, M’ne, they would need to move mountains to get it back. They come to the UN, they invite you into their social club, but they aren’t like you. Your people…”
I stopped myself. I wanted to say still have a chance, but I could see the growing fury on M’ne’s face.
“I will first tell you how you’re wrong, my old friend,” said M’ne, still not raising his voice above a loud whisper, “then I’ll tell you how you are right. You are wrong in the way you think what has been done can be undone. Once a new cycle of history has started, it is beyond pointless to yearn for the ones that came before. If you really think that our land isn’t gone from us just like it is gone from the grasp of our partners at the UN, you are extremely naïve. Hearth Cave still exists, yet so does their land. What are we in the face of the godlike weight of modern times, modern governments? Our traditional way of life is being kept by only a proud few, yes, but do you really believe our children would prefer to give up their technology to once again return to the dark? It is the observer effect, as I understand it. By seeing us, you have changed us.”
That left me in stunned silence. After an endless moment, he began to speak again.
“But in your little jab, there is a fingerbone of truth,” he continued. “The Zealous People are unlike anyone else today, yet we are forced to fit your molds. Of course I know we are nothing like these other aboveground groups just because our level of self-governance would be arbitrarily deemed a ‘tribe’ by your researchers. Every single one of the Zealous People is the first generation to come into contact with modern society, a dubious honor shared with a vanishing few. Yet we must survive, yes?”
I nodded, mute.
“Well, then, we are back to the cave. Back to questions of survival. And to survive, I would and will continue to do anything. I will associate our people with global causes that do nothing for us. I will smile and nod along and take the money of the fossil fuel industry and the environmental lobby alike. I will spread my people to the wind, marry my daughters off to foreigners who can’t fish in underground lakes, I will sacrifice our God on the altar of your science if I have to. I will make the Zealots a joke, and laugh along with them! Because these things you are so worried about, culture and ways of life and traditions, they are nothing to me!”
M’ne was on his feet now, looking down at me across the clean white tablecloth with contempt.
“What you have forgotten, in the infinite distance your modern era has put between you and the fundamentals of life, is that survival is what matters. Even now, you want us to go back to our cave and keep trapping our rats. You want your grand experiment to continue, because you can’t stand that something you were completely oblivious of is gone forever. You want a beautiful world, an unspoiled paradise, an Edenic way of living that has never existed. Because, still, even after seeing what has happened, you want to study us, but without out all the ‘interference’. You want. I don’t want, Dr. Yasor, I need. I need to keep living, and for my family and friends to keep living too. If my grandchildren’s grandchildren want to gather up all of the other grandchildren’s grandchildren and put them in a spaceship, and launch that ship into cold space with no source of light but fire and a breeding population of cave rats, that is their choice. What I fight for is the ability to give them that choice.”
M’ne sniffed once, threw down a fifty dollar bill for the wine, and strode out of the restaurant, the same steady, confident gait he always adopted. The other patrons of the restaurant, which I had quite ignored until now, looked through their embroidered napkins and clip-on ties at me like M’ne had tossed his wine in my face. I asked a grinning waiter for the check.
I didn’t see M’ne again after that, and I resigned from my post as head of my university’s zealotological department that spring.
By the year 2050, visitors to the Hearth Cave Historical Living Museum began to complain that the basket weavers and fishers and bone shapers and chanters had all been replaced by what seemed like paid actors.