Hello and welcome to the Anthropocene Reviewed, a podcast where we review different facets

of the Human-Centered Planet on a 5-star scale.

Today, I'll be reviewing a 17,000-year-old painting and the Taco Bell Breakfast Menu.

Let's start with the painting.

So if you've ever been or had a child, you will likely already be familiar with hand stencils.

They were the first figurative art made by both our kids.

Somewhere between the ages of two and three, my children spread the fingers of one hand

out across a piece of paper, and then with the help of a parent traced their five fingers.

I remember my son's face as he lifted his hand and looked absolutely shocked to see

the shape of his hand still on the paper, a semi-permanent record of himself.

I am extremely happy that my children are no longer three, and yet to look at their little

hands from those early artworks is to be inundated with a strange soul-splitting joy.

Those pictures remind me that they are not just growing up, but also growing away from

me, running toward their own lives.

And of course, that's meaning I am applying to their hand stencils, and that complicated

relationship between art and its viewers is never more fraught than when we are looking

deeply into the past.

In September of 1940, an 18-year-old mechanic named Marcel Ravi Dott was walking his dog

robot in the countryside of southwestern France when the dog disappeared down a hole.

Robot eventually returned, but the next day Ravi Dott went to the spot with three friends

to explore the hole.

And after quite a bit of digging, they discovered a cave with walls covered with paintings, including

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