Oh joy. Another ‘groundbreaking’ discovery has emerged from the depths of a damp cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi to remind us that humans have been insufferable for even longer than we previously feared. Archeologists, a group of people whose primary hobby is arguing over the carbon-dating of fossilized refuse, are currently hyperventilating over a stencilled outline of a hand. They are calling it the 'red claw.' They say it 'rewrites the timeline' of human creativity. In reality, it simply proves that 51,000 years ago, some prehistoric bore had the exact same urge as a modern influencer: to point at something and scream, 'Look at me! I exist!'

This 'red claw'—which is really just the silhouette of a hand made by blowing ochre through a tube like a prehistoric spit-wad—is now the world’s oldest known cave painting. It predates the famous European sites by millennia, a fact that has sent the academic world into a tailspin. The scientists are tripping over their own tweed jackets to declare this a 'triumph of the human spirit.' I see it for what it actually is: the world’s first 'Out of Office' reply. This wasn't a masterpiece of creative expression; it was a bored hominid with nothing better to do while waiting for a mammoth to wander into a pit. We are celebrating the birth of the selfie, just with more dirt and fewer filters.

The obsession with 'rewriting the timeline' is a classic symptom of the human delusion that we are on a path of 'progress.' We love to find older and older artifacts because it allows us to feel a sense of grand lineage. We want to believe that the 'red claw' is the ancestor of the Mona Lisa or the Guernica. It isn’t. It’s the ancestor of a 'Kilroy Was Here' scrawl on a bathroom stall. It is the primal scream of a creature that is terrified of its own insignificance, leaving a smudge on a rock in a desperate, futile attempt to achieve immortality. Fifty-one thousand years later, we are still doing the exact same thing, just with higher-resolution screens and significantly more debt.

Naturally, the political vultures will find a way to pick at this carcass. The performative Left will use this as a cudgel to 'decenter' Europe, as if being the first group of people to discover that red mud sticks to walls is a prestigious geopolitical achievement. They’ll write endless, agonizing op-eds about how this discovery 'challenges the Western-centric narrative of cognitive evolution,' as if a handprint in Indonesia somehow negates the fact that we’re all currently staring into a digital abyss of our own making. They want to turn a caveman’s boredom into a manifesto for prehistoric inclusivity.

Meanwhile, the moronic Right will either ignore the discovery because it involves 'science'—a concept they find increasingly suspicious unless it’s used to extract oil—or they will find a way to be offended by it. If it doesn't fit into a six-thousand-year-old timeline or involve a muscular, blonde-haired deity, they aren't interested. To them, a handprint in Sulawesi is just a distraction from the 'real' issues, like ensuring that the middle class continues to subsidize the lifestyles of the billionaire class. They don’t care about the history of human creativity; they only care about how much they can charge for the rights to mine the mountain the cave is in.

The truth is that this 'red claw' is a mirror, and the reflection is hideous. It shows a species that hasn't changed its fundamental nature in fifty-one millennia. We are still grasping, still tagging our territory, and still mistaking our basic biological functions for 'art.' The researchers point to this hand and see the 'dawn of the creative mind.' I look at it and see the beginning of the end. It is the first piece of evidence in a 51,000-year-old crime scene: the story of a species that spent its entire existence trying to prove it was special, only to end up choking the planet with the plastic leftovers of its 'creativity.'

Let’s be honest about what we’re looking at. This isn't a 'milestone.' It’s a smudge. It’s a reminder that even when we lived in caves and fought big cats with sharpened sticks, we were still narcissistic enough to think our handprints deserved to be preserved. We haven't 'evolved' our intellect; we’ve only evolved our tools for vanity. From ochre to Instagram, the message remains the same: 'I was here, I was bored, and I want you to notice.' If this is the 'cradle of human creativity,' then the baby grew up to be a vapid, self-absorbed disappointment. Put the lights out in the cave. We’ve seen enough.