LEPENSKI VIR, Serbia — The faces are haunting. About 8,000 years ago, over a period of perhaps 200 years, artists that lived in this settlement on the banks of the Danube carved about 100 sandstone boulders with faces and abstract designs. The faces are simple, with wide round eyes, a stylized nose and down-turned open mouths. They do not look happy.

I imagine these stone heads posing an existential question something like the one my son startled us with when we told him that he had to go to play group even if he didn’t want to. He was 3, and as the loss of freedom struck him, he wailed: “How did this happen to me?”

Archaeologists say the heads seem to be a mixture of human and fish features, accounting for their strangeness. Some designs look like fish skeletons. The gorges and pools in this part of the Danube were long a home to sturgeon and other large fish that sustained human life. Perhaps a fishing people imagined their souls migrating into fish after death.

And many of these sculptures were kept in strange trapezoidal dwellings, with hard limestone floors. In some cases the dead lay buried under the homes. So the sculptures might have represented ancestors. I take this as consistent with my interpretation. You die and suddenly you’re a sturgeon: What’s your first question?