The Neo-Neolithic.(Brief Article)

What with climate changes that would topple a triceratops and the Dow mired in a tar pit, we seem to be working our way back to the dawn of time. If I'm doomed to devolve, I've decided, best to go whole hog. Which has brought me to Green Flats--a backyard off back roads in the upstate township of Hancock, New York--for something called the annual Atlatl Rattle.

For those not up to speed on prehistoric hunting tools, an atlatl (pronounced at-LAT-tul) is that prong-ended, dart-throwing, sticklike gizmo that bested the hand-chucked spear before losing out to the strung bow. Harking back some 20,000 years, from the days when flint tools were high tech, the atlatl extended a hunter's reach and added spring to his throw. With it, he could propel a feathered dart with enough force and accuracy to bring down a woolly mammoth. So the Atlatl Rattle, I decided, would be a sort of dawn-of-time party, a Paleolithic bash for 21st-century hunter-gatherers eager to trade in their Palm PDAs for a jungle drum.

I'm wary of competitive sports, having had my head reshaped with a softball perhaps once too often as a tot. But I figured it would be fun nonetheless to cavort with a bunch of wild cave dwellers--the kind with teeth in their jewelry and fur pelts girding their loins. At the very least, I imagined, someone would drag me around by my hair. Never did it occur to me, rounding the last bend on a remote dirt lane just past the Hancock town dump, that I'd discover my ideal of Stone Age America to be threatened with extinction.

I mean, in four days of jamboreeing I saw nary a beer-logged WrestleMania fan in ersatz leopard skin. Not one single cave babe with bones through her ears showed me the mastodon tattooed on her gluteus maximus, nor did any Neanderthal flirtatiously ply me with "Flintstones" burgers or "Jurassic Park" daiquiris. No, this Rattle belied its suggestive name.

Atlatlers, I soon learned, are earnest folk, full of humane values and intellectual curiosity. Back in the misty reaches of the 1980s, it seems, students of Early Man experimented with the atlatl and realized throwing it could be fun. Interest spread, and with the peculiar drive to package pleasure that Americans enjoy inflicting upon such otherwise idle pursuits, rules and standards soon evolved that have since been codified, by no less than the World Atlatl Association. Thanks to the Webby reach of worldatlatl.org, atlatling has once again become the globe-spanning sensation of yore.

"Smart jocks" may be an oxymoron, but Green Flats is thick with them. Gary Fogelman, editor of Indian-Artifact Magazine, is ...