The intellectual giants of our era have finally stumbled upon a smudge of red ochre on a cave wall in Sulawesi, Indonesia, and they expect us to be impressed. A 67,800-year-old handprint. Fantastic. We have discovered that nearly seventy millennia ago, some bored biped decided to ruin a perfectly good piece of limestone by slapping their palm against it. Anthropologists are currently fluttering their collective eyelashes, calling it a breakthrough in the evolution of human expression, which is just a fancy, tenure-protected way of saying we have been narcissistic vandals since the Pleistocene. This handprint predates the last ice age, the invention of the wheel, and the first time a prehistoric grifter traded a shiny rock for someone else’s dinner. It is the original 'I was here' written in the blood of the earth, and frankly, looking at the state of the world today, I wish they’d just left it alone.

One researcher, likely desperate for a grant or a mention in a journal that isn’t read by more than twelve people, noted that the discovery was 'hiding in plain sight' all this time. Of course it was. Humanity has a remarkable, almost supernatural talent for missing the obvious while obsessing over the trivial. We can map the genome of a fruit fly and build telescopes that see the dawn of time, yet we missed a giant red hand on a wall for seventy thousand years. It is a perfect metaphor for our entire species: we are so busy looking for the 'meaning' of life that we fail to see we have already left our greasy, unwashed prints all over the crime scene of history. This 'hiding in plain sight' phenomenon isn't a testament to the cave's camouflage; it's a testament to the staggering blindness of the 'experts' who have walked past it with their noses buried in digital screens for decades.

From my perspective, this isn't art; it’s a receipt for a life wasted. While this ancient individual was busy immortalizing their appendages on a rock, they probably should have been figuring out how to stop their children from being eaten by sabertooth tigers or perhaps inventing a primitive form of soap. But no, the urge to say 'Look at me, I exist!' was apparently more pressing than actual survival. We see the same pathology today in every corner of our rotting society. The cave painter of Sulawesi is the spiritual ancestor of the modern influencer, both of them shouting into the void, hoping the universe will care about their mediocre existence. The only difference is that the cave painter used mineral pigments, while the modern version uses filters and desperation.

Naturally, the political vultures will find a way to pick at this ancient carcass. On the Right, the moronic traditionalists will likely ignore it because it doesn’t fit into their six-thousand-year timeline of the universe, or they’ll find a way to claim the cave as private property to be strip-mined for limestone. On the Left, the performative activists will spend the next six months arguing over the hand’s likely gender, socio-economic status, and whether the act of painting on the cave wall was an early form of colonialist expansion against the local lichen. Both sides will miss the point entirely, which is that we are a species of insects obsessed with our own importance, regardless of the era.

Consider the sheer hopelessness of it all. We have spent nearly 68,000 years doing exactly the same thing. We haven't evolved; we have just scaled up our delusions. The cave painter wanted to be remembered by a small tribe of hunter-gatherers who would likely forget them as soon as the first snow fell. Today’s digital cave painters want to be remembered by five million bots on a platform owned by a billionaire who thinks he can colonize Mars because he’s bored with Earth. The medium has changed from cave walls to fiber-optic cables, but the vapid emptiness of the gesture remains the same.

We are a species that finds a 67,800-year-old smudge and calls it 'significant.' Significant of what? Of the fact that we have been taking up space and demanding attention for far longer than anyone ever asked us to? If this handprint is the 'oldest rock art,' it merely proves that human vanity is the oldest and most resilient disease on the planet. I look at that handprint and I don't see the 'dawn of human creativity.' I see a stop sign that we’ve been ignoring for seventy thousand years. We should have stopped there. We should have looked at that hand on the wall, realized we’d peaked at 'messy finger-painting,' and called it a day. Instead, we built empires, launched wars over imaginary lines, and invented the 24-hour news cycle. The handprint in Sulawesi isn't a triumph; it's a warning from the past that we’ve been wasting our time since the very beginning.