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Alexandros comments on A Transhumanist Poem - Less Wrong
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Don't mean to nitpick, but I'm weary of saying there was a 'first man'. This is what Christians who accept evolution assert to reconcile it with their Adam & Eve biblical stories and it's not really true unless you strain your definition of 'human'. As I understand it, populations evolve together and remain reproductively compatible throughout.
The line should be parsed "the first man that held a stick" rather than "the first man, which held a stick". Though breaking the line after "man" does invite the reader to imagine an overall first man.
I perceived it as "the first man that held a stick" and didn't notice the other way of seeing it.
It was a metaphor that felt natural. There probably wasn't one person who invented cave paintings, any more than there was a literal 'first man', but it makes sense to (to me) to use it in a poem, as a metaphor, because it makes a more concrete image than trying to be literal. Also, I guess I assumed that on lesswrong, no one would interpret 'the first man' in the Christian sense.