What were those tools? I’ll admit that I don’t know for sure, but I’ll hazard a guess that the cache may have included scrapers used to process skins, club heads, maybe spear points, maybe some sharp edges used to cut meat or hides. Those all sound like things that would be needed. Those sound like things that, if kept around, might increase the chances of getting through another winter. Just as a modern man considers dollar bills to be treasure, I think those tools were a form of treasure to the people who owned them. So why would they bury them?
For sure, we could dream up some remotely possible but unlikely reasons. Maybe a member of the group lost their mind, stole the tools, and buried them. Maybe they were an offering of some sort to a god of some sort. Explanations like these can’t be arbitrarily ruled out. They could have happened. But it seems more likely to me that those tools would have been buried for the same reason that everything else would have been done in the hard lives of the people who owned them. They would have been buried because the people judged that burying the tools somehow made it more likely that the group would survive.
So how could burying your valuable tools advance your cause? I can think of a few possible reasons. Maybe other people have been spotted in the area and you are worried that another group is going to take your tools from you. And so perhaps you should hide them in the ground. Or maybe your group is going to leave the area for an extended period of time during which the tools will not be needed. Maybe it would be best to conceal them with the intention of uncovering them when you return. Or maybe you overpowered another group, killed them all and took their tools. Now you have more than you currently need or can carry.
These seem to me to be just the same types of reasons that more modern people hide things, including their hoards of cash. Either they don’t trust other people, or they plan to be gone for a while, or they stole it and need to conceal it. Maybe the accountant and his hirsute predecessor have more in common than might be apparent at first glance.
So we think we may have an idea of why the tools might have been buried. But there’s another nagging question. Why weren’t they retrieved? Why did they lie in the ground, not just for centuries, but for millennia?
One obvious possibility is that the people who placed them there forgot where they put them. Perhaps. In modern times, I would say that might be likely. After all, we often can’t even find our car keys. But the people we are talking about had to have particular powers of observation to live in their environment. I would expect they would be able to find their tools if they wanted to. Might they have succumbed to the rigors of the land before they could reclaim their precious belongings? Is it even possible that they might have migrated to another, easier, place, never to return?
Well, we don’t know. And we never will.
But the story itself brings to my mind a vision of a time in a cold land hundreds of generations ago. I have an image of a wily and resourceful person, a person with the power and influence to make decisions in his group, taking just one or two trusted companions, all looking frequently over their shoulders while carefully burying their treasure, speaking in low tones or not at all, whisking the ground with branches to hide the evidence of their enterprise, spreading leaves to cover the freshly disturbed dirt. People not unlike ourselves, but with an immensely harder lot. Doing, to survive, whatever had to be done.
The End