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Story
and artwork by
Dean Adams Curtis "From the paintings deep within Lascaux Cave in France, to skulls and bones sacredly preserved in plaster by people at Catal Huyuck in Turkey, the giant progenitors of all today's cows and bulls, the extinct aurochs, are only faintly recalled," Archaeologist Maria Demeter wrote in her article for a journal about Neolithic archaeology that was published just before she flew away from New Haven, on her way to the summer excavation in which she stands.
"It is saddening to me that many of my students have no idea about the Maria remembers writing these words as she approaches the gargantuan skull of an extinct prehistoric bull. The skull is so impossibly large that any other modern human but her would assume it to be a fake. However, Maria's long studies deeply into and broadly through human prehistory, as well as her knowledge about the extinction of this magnificent ancestor of every head of cattle on Earth, immediately informs her about the object she approaches.
"Hello Mister Auroch," Maria says, shining her light back and forth over the mega skull of the extinct bull. She reaches out her left hand to touch the plaster covered skull. As her weight shifts forward, she hears a loud CRACK as the floor beneath her fails.
Maria falls through the darkness into a new room. As she plummets, her
adrenaline makes her feel more aware and alive than she ever recalls sensing. No life experience or
orgasm
has left her so attuned. Like an omniscient observer she monitors her mind recording the wall paintings illuminated by her light as it falls.
She hears her light smash into something, then almost simultaneously feels her skull
fracture as it slams against a smooth slab. She senses pain signals arriving
from everywhere in her body, then a vast wave overwhelming exaltation, then nothing.
Well, not exactly nothing. Gradually, somewhere in a void of dimension between
here and there, the complex energy entity who was known as archaeologist Maria
Demeter begins
to sense itself again. At first the sensations come from toes rubbing against a
surface that feels slippery. Next, tender fingers reach out and touch
a warm, slick substance. Slowly, without reason or apprehension, eyes open and a
fresh mind is dazzled by what it beholds.
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Next episode: "Prehistoric Rebirth"
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existence of these
magnificent, though now
extinct, bovine giants
of prehistory. When I share with students a photo of a fresco painted on the walls of Crete,
depicting the earliest known athletes doing gymnastic flips between horns of
massive aurochs, they are, to put it mildly, stunned.
