An Anthropological Curiosity

The reports predicted snow that night. So Friday in my classroom, the possibility was on my students' minds. Having finished her work, one girl asked to draw on the board and so I allowed her to do so.

She proceeded to draw a snow scene, complete with snowman. I thought I had seen something like this before, some event related somehow - and I realized what it was. Cave paintings.

One theory about the purpose of those paintings has it that they were magical in nature, as they often showed hunting scenes. If some of them were done as a way to attract success in hunting, what happened in my classroom was another example of the same thing - sympathetic magic.

In some ways, how little do we change, as a species, in thirty thousand years. The girl would most likely not be happy to think of her actions as magical, and it is possible she would doubt that humanity was so old. Nevertheless, without knowing it, she affirmed the connection we all still have to our ancestors in the ancient past.