Cave Girl Principles

Larry Chan takes us back to the dawn of thought.

- Larry Chan

Stick was curled on a rock jutting out of the ice sheet. Her long red hair was tangled around her small flinted spear. Her bow rested at her side, along with its one remaining arrow. She furrowed her brow at the oxen in the distance. Many thoughts were on her mind - but one thing she could not have fathomed was that autism existed even in the Ice Age. Neither did she know that creative geniuses emerged from the gene pool long before the glaciers took the planet. Stick also knew nothing of the Neanderthals that had roamed the lands ten thousand years before her birth.

She'd already expended about a third of her expected lifespan: she was celebrating her seventh birthday. It was curious that she knew it was her seventh birthday, for not even her elders yet understood the concept of number, or that the stars followed a precise yearly pattern. But Stick knew much more than basic integers. She understood the concept of acceleration. She knew that falling objects moved at the same speed. She also knew that firing an arrow at a 45-degree angle maximized its travel distance. She was just waiting for the prey to come into range.

Eventually, a young calf wandered the wrong way. Her stonetipped wooden missile flew in a parabolic trajectory and became lodged in its neck - at a 45-degree angle. Once its herd had abandoned it for dead, Stick tied a rope around its hooves and dragged it across the snow.

Once the stars showed themselves, she lit herself a campfire and created a fence of wooden stakes in a circle around her, sharpened ends pointing outward. She knew the fire would attract wolves; but she hoped it would also attract her tribe, from whom she had been separated during the last hunt.

She burnt her dinner to a crisp. She liked the way the charcoaled skin of the ox leg bubbled with fat. Then she gave herself a snow bath.