[aNYCguy]

This suggest to me that the artist(s) was fully aware of his own mortality. Do you suppose that animals have such awareness? Or homo erectus, for that matter?

Homo erectus were tool users with problem-solving intelligence, and they ceramonially buried their dead with tools and objects like horn racks. Ditto Neandertals, of course. I think their awareness of mortality is obvious, but you can decide for yourself.

Elephants show a particular and unusual interest in other dead elephants, and distinguish between the bones of elephants and other animals. Again, you can decide for yourself:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/1031_051031_elephantbones.html

[betty boop]

Elephants show a particular and unusual interest in other dead elephants, and distinguish between the bones of elephants and other animals. Again, you can decide for yourself.

Thanks so much for writing, a NYCguy. Still, the fact that an elephant is aware of dead things, and can distinguish between the bones of elephants and other animals, does not show anything about whether it is aware of its own mortality. It takes a self-reflective consciousness to have such an awareness.

The artist(s) at Lascaux demonstrably possessed such a consciousness. There is only one human figure depicted at Lascaux; it is an image of a dead man. To me the fact that this figure was painted with an erect phallus is of extraordinary interest -- and significance. The dead man has apparently just been taken out by a raging bull; we are looking at the instant of his death. Why the phallus -- except to denote the idea that death and life were even then understood to be intimately, inseparably intertwined? I had thought that particular insight dated back only so far as the pre-Socratic Greeks; e.g., Heraclitus, and made thematic in Plato. I am simply amazed at the incredible antiquity of this understanding, rendered recognizably in the great art at Lascaux.