Irving Finkel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Stories, telling of stories. It doesn’t have to be pragmatic, it could be… …Literary in a way. Yeah. Either a human person like Gilgamesh or stories about the gods, and someone sees the Milky Way and they think, “There’s a god riding a chariot up it,” and then they have a story about… you know, and all those sorts of things. Or whatever it would be. But I think probably you have to allow for a strong creative principle surfacing in Homo sapiens at a quite early age, because of the paintings on cave walls… You try drawing a running antelope in color on a wall. I mean, the quality of the workmanship, of the artistic ability, is unsurpassable. It’s not just good. So how is that an explicable thing at this very early date? It means that among all the population, you have imbeciles and Einsteins, and somewhere along the line you have Rembrandts. And I imagine that half the cave paintings in Europe were done by one person. I mean, you get the impression every family had a genius painter. It’s impossible. Probably there was a person who went from place to place doing these paintings because they could draw straight away accurately like that. But they are a distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill. So this, this is right at a pretty early stage, is it not, the cave painting material? So if you consider the human stock which encapsulates such ideas ever after, then you have to reckon with that. You have to reckon with that. Very creative, very creative people. So the function of stories to tell the young and about what happened and about famous battles or when the flood came, or how people learned to make fire, or how we invented the wheel. All those sorts of things everybody puts down, but that’s presumably what absolutely happened. And you have the capacity for people to adore and to respect among their own kind people of astounding ability. There must have been hunters who were ferociously quick and, you know, wrestle with polar bears and all that kind of… And all this stuff would be grist to the narrator’s thing. And as things got more complicated and more sophisticated, so lessons might be incorporated or lessons might come out of them unintentionally. Because if you tell a story without a moral, there is usually a moral if you think about it. And many of those stories are sadly lost to time or not yet found. You mentioned floods, and speaking of stories that have been lost and found, you’re well-known for a lot of things. One of them is decoding the so-called Ark Tablet.…

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