This brought back a long-forgotten memory...back when I taught humanities decades ago, I had a “prehistoric” lecture where I described a bunch of “cave men” having a business meeting, where they were looking for solutions for the problem of spending 90% of their time hunting and gathering. One groups decides they could make life easier by domesticating animals, so they wouldn’t have to hunt, and the other group decides they could make life easier by domesticating plants, so they wouldn’t have to gather. So the two groups go their separate ways; one becomes pastoral, and the other becomes agricultural, and the rest is, well, history, because pastoral cultures emphasized portable arts like poetry, and agricultural cultures emphasized immovable arts like architecture—Egyptians built pyramids, Israelites wrote psalms. It’s much more complex than that, of course, but this was for students whose experience with culture began and ended with yogurt, IYKWIM.
Ancient cave paintings were ‘shopping lists’ made by Mrs. Cavewoman to tell her hubby what to bring home for dinner...............