Painted women of the rain forest, canoeing out of the lost world for the first time. Anthropologists would write about us one day, pick apart the symbolism, guess at the sacred rites behind our body decorations. Assume there was some ritualistic fertility goddess we worshipped. There would be dioramas of us in museums, naked but painted like birds and stars and moths and hearts. We would call into question all the previously accepted reasons why women painted their bodies and faces. Was it only to attract the male, to further the tribe? Or was there some darker, more sinister objective at play? They would investigate the way we lived and played, what we made and ate, what our bones could tell them about nutrition, child bearing, strange and exotic rites of passage. Would our menstrual blood be mixed with pigment and left as residue on pottery fragments? Would we have been the keepers of tribal lore? Perhaps we would have been like Artemis with painted bodies as camouflage for the hunt.
