Excitement Over 20,000 Year Old Cave Paintings Fades - 'Neanderthal' Animal Drawings Actually Work of Homeless Art School Graduate Living in East Blue Hills Woods

UMass Boson Archeological Team Flummoxed

(UPI) A newly discovered series of cave paintings were initially 'discovered' by a team of professors and student 'volunteer' archeologists from the Gender Studies Department of the University of Massachusetts at Boson.  The images of ancient animals of the New England area during the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago were carbon dated and also identified as having been painted by a female the 'all women' team of explorers wrote in their conclusions.

The team had been exploring the Eastern Blue Hills Reservation while the UMass Boson campus closed down when rules of social distancing were received.

Exploring a cave they found behind a thick growth of bushes at the foot of Big Blue they kept six feet apart as they move through the underground cave with shoulders bent forward because of the low roof of the passage.  They came into a broad area with a high stone ceiling; the walls were covered in cave paintings.

The glory of ancient artists came to light as they let their bright flashlights play upon the images.  The team felt that they were the first humans to see these pictures in thousands of years. 

The hands on the walls images were interpreted by the professors as a kind of 'attendance' list that people coming into the cave for a meeting used to 'check in.' 

The discovery of the cave paintings suggest prehistoric women battled a variety of inner demons, nagging fears, and insecurities that plagued them as they struggled with life’s demands in the Paleolithic era.

According to lead researcher Alice Reddy, the images found on the limestone walls and ceiling of the cave trace back to 14,000 BCE at the latest and seem to indicate that early hunter-gatherering women  were often anxious about their ability to kill game animals, reeled from the challenges of raising a family, and “generally had a really hard time keeping it together in the face of the growing patriarchy.”

“While these pictographs are crude in terms of their rendering of human anatomy, they have a vivid expressive quality that led our team to surmise that Ice Age humans had an awful lot of personal struggle to maintain a peacefully oriented matriarchy with female gods,” said Reddy, showing reporters a photo of a rudimentary figure painted in smeared charcoal that appeared to be on its knees weeping into its hands. 

“Although we don’t want to read too much into these images at this point, it’s hard not to deduce that our prehistoric female ancestors were often desperately lonely and felt like they had no one else to turn to with cold hearted males who were always going off on a hunt or brewing mead with their male friends.”

“This one seems as if it’s suddenly waking up in the middle of the night,” added Reddy, pointing to a figure that appeared to be sitting bolt upright on a mat of antelope skin. “If you look carefully, you can still see how the artist used daubs of yellow clay to drench him in sweat.”

Reddy confirmed that other images in the cave include a downcast man apparently being mocked by potential mates for his inability to start a fire, a woman using a stone chopping implement to cut her mate's head off, and a seated man seemingly resigned to his fate at the approach of a charging mastodon. Further chemical analysis will have to be conducted to determine if the ominous red handprints along the walls were symbolic works rendered in red ochre or simply the result of anguished early humans striking the stone surface until they started to bleed.

“What’s remarkable is how, with just a few basic pigments and the most primitive painting tools, our ancestors could so intensely portray their dread of dying alone or their toxic jealously of alpha males,” said Reddy, adding that only a highly skilled but extremely alienated artist could use nothing but melted animal fat blown through a hollow bone to convey his dismay at having no one he could consider a close friend and realizing he was too old to make new ones. “It’s clear that these humans felt so disconnected from one another, so unable to constructively address their problems, that they used these sad, disturbing paintings as their sole outlet for comfort.”

According to Reddy, the paintings not only represent the ability of Late Stone Age humans to express their immediate emotional torment but perhaps also to construct larger, more elaborate narratives of their prolonged, agonizing downward spirals. Through paint-application analysis and radiocarbon dating methods, Reddy said his team was able to determine that individual artists sometimes depicted their unraveling over a series of months or even years.

“Here you can see the same figure gorging on bison and growing more and more obese, apparently stuck in a lengthy cycle of compulsive overeating,” said Reddy, adding that the self-destructive pattern was broken only once by an extremely brief sequence of dynamic images suspected to be a quickly abandoned attempt at aerobic activity. “The drawings finally stop after about 20 meters with a half-finished pictograph of what we speculate is the poor man attempting and failing to fit into his deer-hide frock and pants and then, out of apparent shame, opting not to leave his cave all day.”

“Honestly, I’m glad the paintings didn’t go on much longer,” added Reddy. “Archaeological discovery or not, it’s hard to watch a guy like this.”

 The discovery and onsite press conference were interrupted by a homeless art school grad student who has been 'sleeping rough' in the East Blue Hills Reservation after the Mass College of Art Boson closed down the dorms and told students to go home.  

"I've been passing my time by painting under overpasses of the Southeast Expressway just where it goes over the Neponset River," the man said, "I used all my spray paint and canned paint on the concrete walls over there," the shaggy haired artist explained.  "I started using primitive painting implements like burnt sticks on the cave walls and copied drawings out of my art school text books.  Almost every drawing book starts with a nod to the cave paintings.  I just copied those.'

"I incorporated the Clock Tower from Boson City Hall," the artist pointed out on one of the paintings on the cave.  

Nearby the Gender Studies professors stood by with their arms folded and stone faced expressions.  There will be no academic paper written about this discovery.  

Other clues as to the more recent creation of the line drawings could have been observed in the inclusion of an anachronistic laptop computer in one scene. 

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