The Neolithic "Brooks" (An Original short story)

This story to a large degree was influenced by the post of @kibela and our subsequent discussion

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Professor Karloff curled his lower lip and pounded on it with his middle and index fingers. This bad habit stayed with him since childhood, despite the desperate measures to get rid of it undertook first by his mother and then by his wife. This gesture always meant the same thing – something was off in the way he interpreted the available facts. Professor was looking at the large color print sent to him from the current cave polychrome painting job site. It was a 1920x1482 print of the Neolithic cave painting.

The painting reflected a common for this time period hunting scene.  A group of warriors armed with javelins and bow & arrows was chasing two dears.  Their arms with weapons were raised, which elongated their bodies, making their figures more intimidating.  It looked like they were trying to scare the animals and make them run to a specific direction where, apparently, another group of warriors set the ambush and had a better chance of making a kill.

A different explanation could also be inferred.  The group of hunters was telling a tale of a successful hunt.  This wasn't apparently just any hunt, but a hunt, on which much of the tribe's future depended on.  Maybe tribal members have already not eaten for several days and to catch and kill those animals was a matter of tribal survival.  Therefore, the success was celebrated so emotionally and even was decided to be placed on the wall of the cave to be transferred to the all the generations of descendants.   Maybe the hunters found a new land full of amazing new animals that promised many months of future successful hunts.

In either case, all the warriors in that painting were, obviously, a part of the same composition reflecting an important event that happened some 10 thousand years ago.  All except for one, in the left bottom corner of the photograph.  

Unlike all other hunters that faced the animals, this warrior (the fact that it was a warrior was witnessed by him holding the javelin) was standing facing the audience.  His pose was static, relaxed, and even deliberate as if he was posing for a picture.  He was, obviously, not the part of the same hunt.  More so he wasn't a part of the same composition and therefore was apparently not painted by the same artist.  He was added to the painting later.

Because the painting was of the Neolithic era, it was hard to determine the exact age of the painting, down to a century.  Therefore, was possible that the drawing of a single warrior was added to the same wall a hundred or even a couple of hundred years later.    

Should the rock painting be limited to the hunting scene only, the entire scene would perfectly fit in the current understanding of the Neolithic mentality in either of its interpretation.  Professor Karloff could have easily linked this new find with his previously written monographs on the period and even use it to teach his University classes.

However, this additional "protuberance" on the otherwise smooth body of his theory, made his task much more difficult.

Surely Dr. Karloff could have simply deleted the extra character from the picture.  One click of the Photoshop Fill Data Aware button and the uncomfortable figure would be gone.  But there were two reasons why Dr. Karloff didn't want to do that.

He had many enemies in the scientific community and even in his own University and department.  Envious of his success, they'd never miss this opportunity to blame him in fudging the results.

The other reason was simply his own curiosity.  Yes, this didn't fit the existing scientific paradigm of Neolithic mentality.  Yet, if he would figure out why this additional painting was placed on the wall, this could expand the current scientific understanding of what went through the minds of our remote ancestors.  Thus, now Dr. Karloff thought of this obstacle as an opportunity to make a new scientific discovery.

All things considered, at the moment Dr. Karloff had no explanation of any kind.   That's why now he was curling his lower lip and pounded on it with his middle and index fingers, looking at the photograph.

Dr. Karloff caught himself on the rather annoying feeling.  He was hungry.  Checking the time on his cell phone and acknowledging that it was close to 5 pm, he remembered that today he didn't have lunch since he had a skype meeting with the group from Seattle on another project.

Dr. Karloff sat for another 10 minutes looking at different materials and searching for a similar situation in someone else's practice, but to no avail.  "I guess, today isn't my day." he got up, put the photograph along with some other materials in this briefcase and locked his office behind him.

***

A week has passed.  He almost didn't think about the photograph.  Only sometimes the memory of not fulfillment flickered on the surface of his mind like a silver moon path on the surface of the water.  Still, while Dr. Karloff was busy doing much stuff related to other projects he performed his work somewhat mechanically like a robot as if his mind ventured into a remote past and got tangled there.  He even agreed with his wife for their next European trip to be Switzerland, where he had no plans rather than to Spain where he had big plans.  The change in their itinerary he'd never agreed upon if his mind would be in the alerted state.

On Sunday he sat in his leather chair in a relaxing and meditative state of mind and felt like watching a movie.  His wife went to a movie theater with her girlfriend.  He didn't mind this at all, not only because he wanted to give his wife some elbow room, but he felt he was cranky and even snapped at some of her remarks, the behavior he'd normally avoided.  He needed to be alone.  After going through multiple menus and watching some movie previews Dr. Karloff scolded himself for this indecisiveness and selected “Shawshank Redemption.”

He'd seen this movie many times but every now and then he felt like watching it again.  And every now and then he discovered something new in that story and the way it was presented.  Today he felt that vague ephemeral sense of upcoming discovery even though he didn't know, which moment of the movie this might bring, even though his internal critic was telling him that this hope was unsubstantial.

He almost watched the entire movie and his inner critique was about to triumph voicing his boring cynical wisdom “I told you so,” when suddenly during one of the final scenes something clicked in Dr. Karloff's head and put a seal of definiteness on the entire blurry business.

It was a place in the movie where Brooks prior to committing a suicide writes something on the structural beam of the half-way house.   

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In the following close up you could see Brooks’ self-made obituary “Brooks was here.”

 

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From the anticipation of success, Dr. Karloff even got a slight headache. He robbed his temples smiling: ‘Of course, everything was so simple. How couldn’t he see this right away?’ Our man was the ancient Brooks, who wanted to express himself and to add something to the annals of history.

However, Dr. Karloff understood that flirting with this anarchistic thought was one thing but to make it a household item was something else; it required some rectification.

Certainly, it seemed that the motives of the ancient man who would leave the drawing of himself, on horseback, or in a boat, or with the favorite weapon as it was in the case of the photograph, were different from those of the modern “Brooks.”

Unlike the modern “Brooks”, the ancient guy would hardly waste his time on scraping of his own figure with his javelin, simply because he had too much time on his hands and see someone else's drawing on the cave wall, he also wanted to make mark his mark in such a cool place.

Perhaps, he wanted to leave the sign to his own tribe or make a memorial of some special event in his life.  For example depicting people wandering on boats down the river to new places, or shock and excitement of meeting a new type of animals. 

Yet this drawing on the photograph had little to do with it.  If anything, it reminded a representative portrait of some government official.

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The motivation of this prehistoric “Brooks” was to express himself and to add his own portrait to the annals of history. For that purpose it would have sufficed to simply write “Brooks was here,” except in the times of this prehistoric “Brooks” writing hasn’t been invented yet and scraping his picture on the cliff was his one choice if he wanted to make his whereabouts timeless. Pissing on the wall wouldn’t have achieved this lofty goal. That much he should understand.

As for holding a prehistoric person in high esteem, thinking purely statistically, where did all these modern Brookses came from?

Dr. Karloff stopped the video and moved the time pointer back to the moment of Brooks' death.  Starting from this moment his thoughts drifted away from the events in a movie and now he simply wanted to enjoy the ending.  ‘I'll deal with the monograph tomorrow' he thought as he clicked the forward button.