Let's write about American missionary history

Maine Writer:  Although many Native American advocates are highly skeptical about American missionaries ,and justifiably so.  

In my experience, however, I know many Native Americans in Maine who are devoutly religious and engaged in Christianity.

Those who embrace Christianity should be respected for their beliefs, taught to them by American missionaries. In fact, my experiences includes attending Native American ceremonies that celebrated spirituality in both the Christian and ancient traditions.  Saint Kateri Tekakwitha is a prime example of a saint that embraces her Mohawk heritage and Christian devotion.  

Father Benjamin Petit at the University of Notre Dame.

An echo essay published in the University of Notre Dame newspaper "The Observer". 

Benjamin Marie Petit (April 8, 1811 – February 10, 1839) was a Catholic missionary to the Potawatomi at Twin Lakes, Indiana, where he served from November 1837 to September 1838. A native of Rennes in Brittany, France, Petit was trained as a lawyer at the University of Rennes, but left the profession after three years to enter the Saint-Sulpice Seminary in Paris to study for the priesthood.

Log Chapel Notre Dame Indiana

On the evening of this February 10, at 7:00 p.m., a special Mass was celebrated at the Log Chapel by Father Paul Doyle, C.S.C. (Congregation of the Holy Cross), University of Notre Dame, to honor Fr. Benjamin Petit, the great missionary to the Potawatomi, who died on this date in 1839. He died of illness and exhaustion after accompanying his Indian parishioners on their forced removal march to Kansas. For the last two years on February 10, a small group of friends have gathered at the Log Chapel, where he is buried, to remember his remarkable life and his early death. 

The log chapel was originally built in 1831 by Rev. Stephen Badin as a mission to the Potawatomi Indians in what would become northern Indiana. It was one of the first Catholic places of worship in Northern Indiana

Father Benjamin Marie Petit was a young man, a former lawyer, a Frenchman, a missionary to America, a Catholic priest and martyr of charity who gave his life in service to the Potawatomi Indians of northern Indiana. I write this short article to make his remarkable story more known among the Notre Dame family.

Three good sources for the life of Fr. Petit that I have consulted are: “Potawatomi Trail of Death: 1838 Removal from Indiana to Kansas,” by Shirley Willard and Susan Campbell (2003), “Walking the Trail of Death,” by Keith Drury (2007) and a historical novel, “The Last Blackrobe of Indiana and The Potawatomi Trail of Death,” by John William McMullen (2010).

In 1835, while studying at the Seminary of St. Sulpice in Paris, Benjamin Petit was recruited by Bishop Brute of Vincennes, Indiana to come to America, finish his priestly training and then serve as a missionary priest in the diocese of Vincennes, which comprised all of Indiana and part of northern Illinois at the time.

People of the Place of the Fire

In 1837, the Catholic Potawatomi people of northern Indiana, facing the threat of imminent forced removal to Kansas, desperately needed a new priest. Bishop Brute cut short Petit’s studies and ordained him to the priesthood early, assigning him to the Potawatomi mission. He ministered at Twin Lakes near Plymouth, Indiana, and at St. Mary of the Lake, outside of South Bend (the future site of the University of Notre Dame). When the removal order came in September of 1838 for the forced march to Kansas, Father Petit obtained the Bishop’s permission to accompany the Potawatomi on their long, sad march. After accompanying the survivors to their new home in Kansas, he started his journey back to Indiana in January of 1839. Being very ill by that time, he stopped in St. Louis, where he stayed at the Jesuit college. He said his last Mass there on Feb. 2, and died on Feb. 10; he was not quite 28 years old. In 1856, Father Sorin brought his body back to Notre Dame. First buried in Sacred Heart Basilica, his remains were later transferred in the 1970s to a grave in the Log Chapel, alongside fellow missionaries Father Stephen Badin and Father Louis DeSeille.

Fr. Petit was a man with wisdom, who made an incredible journey of faith which ended on Feb. 10 in 1839. He is fittingly buried under the Log Chapel at Notre Dame because this saint, this martyr of charity, is truly Notre Dame’s spiritual cornerstone!

He demonstrated his willingness to lay down his life by traveling the Trail of Death simply because he loved his Potawatomi parishioners. His sacrifice provides us with a rich example of a Christian life well lived.

Fr. Petit endured the depredations of the government of the State of Indiana and the federal government as well. He also endured the disease-ridden conditions caused by the forced journey of 660 miles cross country in drought and extreme heat and exposure to extreme cold on his way home to Indiana. He eventually succumbed to an early death caused by this trauma.

Fr. Petit was trained as a lawyer in France before he became a priest, and from his correspondence, one can see both his legal abilities as well as his practical wisdom. For example, he was very adept at managing money. At the beginning of his work with the Potawatomi, he made very serious efforts to appeal to the Federal authorities on their behalf, so they could stay on their ancestral lands in Indiana. But all legal efforts were useless, and he had to accept that his parishioners would be removed.

He clearly gave himself very wholeheartedly to his mission to the Potawatomi. He was able to master all three languages he needed to use — his native tongue, French, the English spoken by the Americans and the language of the Potawatomi. With his characteristic mercy, zeal and compassion — he was able to “pass over” (as Notre Dame’s late theologian Father John Dunne put it) from the different cultural standpoints represented by these three languages and return to his own standpoint of faith enriched by the encounter.

The Potawatomi Trail of Death was the forced removal by militia in 1838 of about 859 members of the Potawatomi nation from Indiana to reservation lands in what is now eastern Kansas.

Fr. Petit worked tirelessly throughout his time on the trail to help the Potawatomi. Years later, in loving remembrance of the sufferings endured by the Potawatomi and Fr. Petit, a group of people made up of historians, Potawatomi, boy scouts, girl scouts and Catholics came together from 1976 till 2003, and placed 80 markers on the “Trail of Death.” It was now possible to travel this whole trail and to remember this tragic journey. In 2006, a theologian from Wesleyan University in Marion, Indiana, Keith Drury, walked the entire 660 miles and wrote the compelling book mentioned above.

“Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

The Trail of Death is a trail of grief and loss, however marked by hope. The hope of the emergence of a gathering of the people of God, a “young Christendom” as Fr. Petit called it.

May I make a suggestion here about the vocation of the University of Notre Dame as it relates to this journey of Fr. Petit and his companions? It seems to me we are caught in a crisis of wisdom, where we might well cry out with the title of one of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s books, “Whose Justice, Which Rationality?”

In the midst of the sharp divisions and political, social and ideological polarization of our society today, Fr. Petit provides a strong example of how to actually embody the love and service of the Gospel. In these present conditions, I see fear playing a greater role in our lives than I could have ever imagined, driven by narratives that are often only half true. In the face of this, Fr. Petit stands out to us for the manner in which he poured out his life for those in his care. And that love — the love of God, issued in the desire to serve God’s glory and the salvation of all people. His desire then bore fruit in practical deeds done for others.

Fr. Petit was willing to take the injustice done to others without going into either rash violence or paralyzing despair. He was willing to patiently wait out the weaknesses of others to whose policies he was radically opposed, not simply to conduct, or to win, a debate. Rather, he acted as he did so he could more effectively serve the common good — beginning with his Potawatomi parishioners.

We are grateful for his example as he faced his trials and endured to become truly Notre Dame’s hidden spiritual cornerstone. Fr. Benjamin Petit pray for us.

Gus Zuehlke ’80 University of Notre Dame

Let's remember Solomon Perel- learn a lot in a well written obituary

Obituary echo published in The New York Times by Richard Sandomir:

ISREAL- Solomon Perel, a German Jew who saved himself from death by posing as a member of the Hitler Youth during World War II and later felt gratitude for the Nazi he pretended to be in order to live, died on February 2 at his home in Givatayim, Israel, near Tel Aviv. He was 97.

Solomon Perel (1925 in Germany-2023 in Israel)

His great-nephew Amit Brakin confirmed the death.

Mr. Perel, who was also known as Shlomo and Solly, recounted his survival story in a 1990 autobiography. It was adapted into a German movie, “Europa Europa,” released in the United States in 1991, which won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film.

Like many other Holocaust survival stories, Mr. Perel’s began with Nazi oppression, which led his family to move in 1936 from Peine, Germany, to Lodz, Poland. After the German invasion on Sept. 1, 1939, they were forced into a ghetto that would house as many as 164,000 Jews. He fled later that year with an older brother, Isaac, in the hope of finding relative safety in Soviet-controlled eastern Poland.

In Bialystok, where he parted with Isaac, Solomon was placed by a Jewish assistance organization in a Soviet orphanage in Grodno (now part of Belarus). He stayed for two years, until Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941; he recalled that the Jewish children at the orphanage were roused from their sleep and told to flee the German attack.

Solomon became one of many refugees captured by the German Wehrmacht in an open field near Minsk.

Fearful that his captors would learn he was Jewish and shoot him in a nearby forest, he dug a small pit in the soft ground with the heel of a shoe and buried his identification papers.

After waiting on a long line, Solomon was asked by a German soldier, “Are you a Jew?” Heeding his mother’s last words to him, “You must live,” but not his father’s, “Always remain a Jew,” he lied: “I’m not a Jew. I’m an ethnic German.”

Not only did the Germans believe him; they welcomed him into their unit under the name Josef Perjell, and made him an interpreter. One interrogation in which he participated was of Joseph Stalin’s son Yakov Dzhugashvili.

“I became a split personality — a Nazi by day and a Jew by night,” Mr. Perel told The Week, an Indian magazine, in 2019. He remained there until his commanding officer sent him to the Hitler Youth boarding school in Braunschweig, Germany, during the winter of 1941-42.

If anyone discovered he was Jewish, “they’d deal with me like cannibals,” he said in “Because You Must Live: The Story of Shlomo (Solly) Perel,” a part of the Survivors Testimony Films Series produced by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.

He was relieved that the school’s showers had separate stalls, which prevented anyone from seeing that he had been circumcised.

But, he said, “nobody suspected me because it was impossible to think that some Jewish boy would sneak into the center of that protected country.”

He became, to the young Nazis surrounding him, a true believer, absorbing the lessons of National Socialism, wearing a uniform with a swastika and a Nazi eagle on his chest and preparing for military service.

“I was a Hitler Youth completely,” he said in the Yad Vashem film. “I began telling myself, ‘Wow, I’m part of a force that’s conquering the world.’”

But he could not switch off his real self entirely. In 1943, during the Christmas holiday, he received a holiday pass and took a train back to Lodz. For 12 days, wearing the black winter uniform of the Hitler Youth, he searched for his parents in the ghetto.

He rode a streetcar, which Jews could not board, back and forth. He walked the city’s streets. He saw men rolling carts piled with Jewish corpses.

But he did not find his mother, his father or his sister, Bertha, none of whom he would ever see again. His brothers, Isaac and David, survived.

Solomon Perel was born in Peine on April 21, 1925. His father, Azriel, owned a shoe store. His mother, Rebecca Perel, was a homemaker.

Solomon was nearly 8 years old when Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, but his life did not change appreciably until two years later, when antisemitic laws stripped Jews of their rights and citizenship. He was expelled from school.

“It was my most traumatic childhood experience,” he said in “Because You Must Live,” “that barbaric expulsion from school because somebody considered me different.”

The family moved to Lodz after his father was forced by the Nazis to sell his store for nearly nothing. Solomon attended a Polish state school for Jews. It was after the Germans invaded Poland and Jewish families were ordered into the Lodz ghetto that he started on the path that led to his lifesaving masquerade as a Nazi.

Simmy Allen, a spokesman for Yad Vashem, said that Mr. Perel’s life as a Jew among the Hitler Youth was more than unusual.

“We know of Jews using false papers and presenting themselves as non-Jews, even Aryans, during the Holocaust in different places throughout Europe, even in Berlin,” Mr. Allen said in an email. “But to be in the heart of the lion’s den, under that level of scrutiny all the time and, in a sense, part of the ideology of the ‘enemy,’ as Shlomo was, is a very unique and rare position.”

Mr. Perel recalled how invested he had become in the Nazi philosophy even as the war turned against Germany.

“I was deeply involved in a world that had been forced upon me, my reasoning powers had finally been completely anesthetized,” he wrote in his memoir, published in English and French as “Europa, Europa,” “and my mental faculties were so befogged that no ray of reality could penetrate. I continued to feel just like one of them.”

As the war neared its end, Mr. Perel was sent to the Western Front, assigned to a unit guarding bridges. When American soldiers arrested him, and his squad and briefly held him in a prisoner-of-war camp, his war was over. He was no longer Josef Perjell. He was once again Shlomo Perel.

Mr. Perel moved to Munich, where he was a translator for the Soviet Army during interrogations of Nazi war criminals. He emigrated to the British mandate of Palestine, fought in the Israeli war of independence and managed a zipper factory.

In 1959, he married Dvora Morezky. She died in 2021. He is survived by a son, Uziel, and three grandchildren. Another son, Ronen, died in 2019.

For many years Mr. Perel put his memories of the Holocaust aside. But in the late 1980s, after a near-fatal heart attack, he began to discuss his past and to write his memoir.

The film adaptation, written and directed by Agnieszka Holland, starred Marco Hofschneider as Mr. Perel. It earned Ms. Holland an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay.

In addition to winning the Golden Globe for best foreign film, the movie was named best foreign film by the New York Film Critics

Circle, the Boston Society of Film Critics and the National Board of Review. But the German Export Film Union declined to select it as its entry for an Academy Award for best foreign film — a decision that prompted many of Germany’s leading filmmakers, including Wolfgang Petersen and Werner Herzog, to sign a letter of protest that was published in Daily Variety.

Mr. Perel attended the film’s premiere in Lodz.

Wehrmacht, (German: “defense power”) the armed forces of the Third Reich. The three primary branches of the Wehrmacht were the Heer (army), Luftwaffe (air force), and Kriegsmarine (navy).

In 1992, he reunited with some of his former Hitler Youth comrades and revealed to them that he was Jewish. Some years earlier, he had gotten together with surviving members of the Wehrmacht unit that had accepted him as a German.

He lectured about his experiences in Israel and around the world. “He insisted on including, with every lecture or talk he gave, a message for accepting the other,” Mr. Brakin, his great-nephew, said in a text message, “including the one that is different, and a message against racism in any form it might take.”

But Mr. Perel never fully purged himself of the Nazi identity he had adopted.

“To this day, I have a tangle of two souls in one body,” he told The Washington Post in 1992. “By this I mean to say that the road to Josef, the Hitler Youth that I was for four years, was very short and easy. But the way back to the Jew in me, Shlomo, or Solly, was much harder.”

“I love him,” he said, referring to Josef, “because he saved my life.”

Richard Sandomir is an obituaries writer.

Let's write about the Holocaust Remembrance Day stories from survivors

 This essay echo about "Remembering Jewish Salonica: The beauty and fragility of a pluralistic metropolis", was published in the Rotary International Magazine, written by Carl Gershman.

When I attended nursing school, before I achieved my academic degree with a major in nursing, my learning experience was in a Jewish hospital. I met Holocaust survivors who were patients in the hospital and all of them still had tattoos branded on them by the Nazis.

From Rotary International Magazine Rosanna Tasker

Obviously, I am very emotionally moved when I read about Holocaust survivors and this particular essay was about a place most people probably never heard of and have no idea about its long history.

Carl Gersham nurtured a special interest in Thessaloniki, the northern Greek city on the edge of the Balkans, since I traveled there in 1996 to attend a conference on rebuilding democracy and civil society in the Balkan region after the breakup of Yugoslavia. While in Thessaloniki, I decided to take the opportunity to learn something about the city's rich Jewish history, particularly under the Ottomans when it was called Salonica.

I had read Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan, who traced the modern history of the region, from the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia. And the organization I headed, the National Endowment for Democracy, supported civil society groups working against such brutalities in the Balkans. But exploring Thessaloniki's Jewish past offered new perspectives on the region's history. I met with Rena Molho, president of the Society for the Study of Greek Jewry, who ran a bookshop on Tsimiski Street that Kaplan had called "the lone thriving remnant of Jewish Salonica." She told me about her efforts to preserve the memory of Salonica's Jewish community that was nearly destroyed in the Holocaust.

Memories of that visit came flooding back in February 2021, when I listened to an interview with Albert Bourla, the CEO of Pfizer, about his family's Jewish roots in Thessaloniki and how his parents survived the Holocaust. Bourla was in the news frequently then, talking about the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. But it was that interview about his family story that captured my attention and gave me a much deeper understanding of the Jewish experience in Thessaloniki. His story has important lessons today for all of us in our very troubled world.

Albert Bourla was born and raised in Thessaloniki, Greece

Bourla's ancestors were among the tens of thousands of Sephardic Jews who took refuge in the Ottoman Empire after they were expelled from Spain in 1492. Along with 20,000 other Jewish refugees from Spain, they settled in Salonica, where the Jewish community soon blossomed into such a thriving center of Spanish-Jewish learning and commerce that Salonica became known as "the Mother of Israel." The community's rabbis, lawmakers, and poets were famous throughout the Diaspora, attracting students and Torah scholars from many cities. The beautiful hymn "Lekhah Dodi," still sung by Jews throughout the world to welcome the Sabbath, was written by one of the most prominent Salonican rabbis of the 16th century, Solomon Alkabez.

By 1900, about 80,000 Jews lived in Salonica, where they made up nearly half the city's population. They were not just the city's lawyers, physicians, teachers, and merchants but also its dockworkers, fishermen, firemen, and hamals (porters). They were a well-organized, diverse, and dynamic community that, more than any other group, shaped the spirit and life of the city. They maintained 33 synagogues, a rabbinical school, Zionist and intellectual clubs, their own schools that offered vocational as well as academic training, an orphanage, a psychiatric hospital, sports and scouts clubs, organizations that provided poor families with basic necessities, and many other institutions. Between 1865 and 1940 they published 50 newspapers representing all political tendencies in the city.

The importance of the Jewish community in the life of Salonica was perhaps most apparent on Saturdays when the port and virtually the entire city would shut down for the Sabbath. Robust as the Jewish presence was in Salonica, though, it was but one dimension of a bustling, multiethnic metropolis whose population also consisted of large minorities of Turks and Greeks, as well as lesser numbers of Bulgarians, Armenians, and Serbs.

Salonica's diversity was destroyed in the last century by two momentous events that signaled the arrival of a new era of nationalism and ethnic hatred in the Balkan region and beyond. The 1923 Lausanne Treaty that ended the Greek-Turkish war called for the forced population exchange of Greek Orthodox Christians and Muslims that drastically altered the city's pluralistic character — and gave rise to a new name, Thessaloniki. Many Jews emigrated to Western Europe, the Americas, and Palestine, and by the time of the second momentous event, the Nazi occupation of Thessaloniki in 1941, only 50,000 Jews remained, making them a minority in the city for the first time in centuries.

The Holocaust in Thessaloniki was overseen by Adolf Eichmann, and it eliminated 97 percent of the Jewish community. The Nazis did not murder the Jews immediately. They first confiscated all the contents of the community's libraries and archives as well as other treasures and shipped them to Frankfurt for a planned "Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question." They demanded a ransom for the release of 10,000 Jewish men who had been sent to forced labor camps. The Jewish community in Thessaloniki collected money but was forced to turn over its ancient cemetery of a half-million graves to the municipality in lieu of the total sum. The Nazis accepted the money and property but later reneged on the deal, and many Jewish men died of exhaustion and disease in the camps. Meanwhile, the cemetery, a sacred monument to the uninterrupted Jewish presence in the city for more than four centuries, was promptly despoiled, its gravestones used to pave roads, repair buildings, and build a swimming pool for the German army.

The end came in March 1943, when the Nazis herded the remaining Jews into a neighborhood bordering the old railway station that had been built in the 19th century by Baron de Hirsch, the German Jewish philanthropist, to house thousands of refugees from the pogroms in the Russian Empire. What had once been a refuge for persecuted Jews thus became a transit camp from which their descendants were shipped in livestock cars to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Holocaust Remembrance Day January 27, the anniversary of the allies liberation of Auschwitz. On the morning of 27 January 1945, the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps still held some 7,000 prisoners. Over a million people deported to Auschwitz perished there. It is estimated that six million Jews were exterminated in the death camps.

Among the 2,000 survivors were Bourla's parents, who were teenagers at the time and hadn't yet met. Bourla's father, Mois, fled with his brother to Athens just before the Nazis transported Thessaloniki's Jews to Auschwitz. 

In Athens they were given forged identity papers by the city's police chief, acting upon a call by the local Greek Orthodox archbishop to help Jews and they lived there until the end of the war.

Bourla's mother, Sara, was sent to another city by her father to live with her older sister, who had moved when she married a Christian and converted. Sara was safe there because no one recognized her, but that changed when her brother-in-law was transferred back to Thessaloniki. She hid in her sister's house all day long, but one day, when she surreptitiously ventured outside, she was spotted and arrested.

Sara's sister and brother-in-law, Kostas Dimadas, were aware that a truck would arrive at the local prison every day around noon to take some prisoners to a location where they would be executed. 

Dimadas knew that the head of the Nazi occupation forces, Max Merten, had a reputation as an extortionist, and so he paid him a large ransom to spare Sara. Her sister didn't trust the Germans, and so she went every day to the prison to make sure that Sara was not among the doomed prisoners.

As she feared, one day she saw Sara being taken from the prison and put on a truck. She immediately informed her husband, who angrily called Merten and tried to shame him for not keeping his word. The next morning, just as Sara was lined up against a wall to be shot with the other prisoners, a soldier arrived on a motorcycle and handed some papers to the German in charge of the firing squad. Sara and another woman were removed from the line, and as they were being driven away, they could hear the machine gun fire. According to Bourla, it was "a sound that stayed with her the rest of her life."

Bourla's parents both returned to Thessaloniki after the war. They met through family connections, got married, and "built a life filled with love and joy," as Bourla put it when he told this story publicly for the first time on International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2021.

Unlike Holocaust survivors who found it too painful to speak about the horrors they had endured, Mois and Sara would often tell their stories because they wanted their children to remember all the lives that had been lost and to understand what can happen if evil and hatred are allowed to spread unchecked. Most of all, Bourla said, they wanted their children to appreciate the value of human life. He stressed that they never spoke about their experiences with anger or a desire for vengeance. They had "stared down hatred" and wanted to "celebrate life and move forward." Bourla wanted to share their story, he said, in the hope that it might have special meaning at a time "when racism and hatred are tearing at the fabric of our great nation."

Their story continues to have special meaning today as Russia's invasion of Ukraine — along with other genocidal crimes that have been committed in recent decades in other parts of the world — has awakened memories of the Nazi scourge that we thought was no longer possible. With the virus of hatred having returned, it is incumbent upon us all to do whatever we can to ensure that the story of Bourla's family is never repeated and that their values are remembered and preserved. May we summon the courage to rise to this awesome challenge.

Carl Gershman served as president of the National Endowment for Democracy from 1983 ,to 2021.

Let's write about cave painters

Sometimes, a cliché is the best way to summarize an essay echo:

In 1849, French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose “ – the more things change, the more they stay the same… " Turbulent changes do not affect reality....

Storytelling Across the Ages echo essay by Adam Gopnik* published in The New Yorker:

Let's learn a new word:  Therianthropes

Identifying Therianthropes in a Sulawesi cave

From our earliest times of uncertainty, it seems, we have searched for a happy ending.

All times seem, to those within them, to be uniquely miserable.

Even, supposedly, halcyon historical moments were horrible if you had to live through them: the eighteen-nineties in London, which now seem a time of wit and Café Royal luxury, were mostly seen then as decadent, if you were no fan of Oscar Wilde’s, or as dark and disgraceful, if you were. The allegedly placid American nineteen-fifties were regarded, at the time, as a decade of frightening conformity and approaching apocalypse.

But this does not mean that some moments can’t be uniquely miserable. Ours surely is, with the recent collapse of progressive Britain following on the constitutional crisis of liberal America, with so many people around the world caught between political polarities, and with the planet warming daily. No one has ever improved on Yeats’s expression of indignation after the Great War: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity; though in our time the best often share the passionate intensity but can’t be heard, because the worst have a smartphone with a Twitter app.

In the midst of such unease, we tend to seek out moments of cheer or just consolation, and suddenly we have found one, in a cave. The cave is in Indonesia—the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, on the island of Sulawesi, to be precise—and it was occupied, according to recent findings, more than forty thousand years ago, by early modern humans. Inside it for all that time has been a fourteen-and-a-half-foot-wide image, painted in dark-red pigment, depicting about eight tiny bipedal figures, bearing what look to be spears and ropes, bravely hunting the local wild pigs and buffalo. The discoverers of its antiquity, a team of archeologists at Griffith University, in Australia, including Maxime Aubert, the chief author of an article about the painting in Nature, call it “to our knowledge, currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.”

The very first storytelling picture! The first narrative, and it tells one of the simplest and most resonant stories we have: a tale of the hunter and the hunted, of small and easily mocked pursuers trying to bring down a scary but vulnerable beast. What’s more, the hunters appear to be what people whose business it is to decipher cave paintings call therianthropes, humans with animal elements, like heads. These eight, then, are the earliest known examples of this mysteriously durable manner of mythical depiction, which runs forward to Egyptian wall paintings and, for that matter, to modern animation. 

Therianthropes, it seems, reflect the symbolic practice of giving to humans the powers of animals, a shamanistic rite that seems tied to the origins of religion, and here it is, for the first time, a startup.

The detailed resolution of the images in the Nature article is at first disappointing. Though the buffalo, called anoa, are distinct enough, one of the human figures, we’re told, has “a tapering profile that possibly merges into the base of a thick tail and with short, curved limbs splayed out to the side. In our opinion, this part of the body resembles the lower half of a lizard or crocodile. It is thus possible that [the therianthrope] represents a composite of at least three different kinds of animals: a human, an anoa and a quadrupedal reptile.” To this chimerical composite, one might add the trained eye of an Australian archeologist, which seems necessary to ascertain the full effect.

And yet it’s impossible not to feel a shudder of communion with these ancient beings, recounting their hopeful stories of abundance in a time that was, certainly, even more unstable than our own. (We worry daily about the next good leader; they worried daily about the next good meal.) Nor would the storytelling have been the product of a merely male hierarchy of hunting. The patriarchy had little place in caves. A study sponsored by the National Geographic Society in 2013 suggests that three-quarters of the hand stencils found on the walls of dozens of European caves were made by women, and that the paintings alongside them likely were as well. 

Early man may have thrown the spears, but early woman made the pictures telling how.

Significant scientific discoveries do two things at once: advance the narrow field of fact and extend the imaginative field of wonder. Thinking of those images unspooling in the dark of a cave brings to mind many metaphors, among them intimations of modern movies. Indeed, the cave painting could be entered as evidence into a key aesthetic and storytelling argument of today—the debate between the paladins of American film, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, and their Marvel Cinematic Universe contemporaries. Scorsese recently wrote, in the Times, that the superhero genre, whatever charms it may have, is degrading cinema by pulling it away from the real world of ambiguity, from the “complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures, the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” Coppola agreed, telling reporters that the Marvel-franchise movies are “despicable” for failing to supply their audience with “some enlightenment, some knowledge, some inspiration.”

Yet our oldest picture story seems to belong, whether we want it to or not, more to the Marvel universe than to Marty Scorsese’s. The therianthropes, with their composite identities, are really the first superheroes, X-Men united on the wall for a fight. A human with the strength of a bull! Another with the guile of a crocodile! Perhaps the deeper truth is that Scorsese and Coppola are right, in that it takes a huge effort of the disciplined imagination to turn human attention away from daydreams of magical powers to the truth of our contradictory natures. Still, there is no denying our collective relief when the therianthropes arrive to save the day.

Our oldest stories are like our newest; we look for explanation and hope for a happy ending. People, then and now, tell tales about the brave things they are about to do, or just did, or are thinking of doing, or thought they might do, if they were not the people they are but had the superpowers we all wish we had. Our enterprises vary; our entertainments do not. Plans to bring down the hunt and bring home the anoa bacon change; our hopes of getting it done will never alter. It seems a good moral to take us through these difficult days and into the next decade. ♦

*Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. He is the author of, most recently, “A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.