Irving Finkel

And the person who's writing it down says, and then Gilgamesh said, you know, like in a script.

I do.

I think the fireside narrative is

matter you know when we were kids it would be twerps with a guitar and sitting around a fire on holiday but that mechanism when people gather after dark when there is a fire and talk is the sort of environment where narrative accounts flourish naturally among human beings stories telling a story and doesn't have to be pragmatic it can be literary in in a way

Yeah, either a human person like Gilgamesh, or stories about the gods, and someone sees the Milky Way and they think it'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 the paintings on cave walls, you try drawing a running antelope in colour 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 were so...

draw straight away accurately like that but the they are distillation of creative artistic ability plus skill so this this is right at the 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.