The Caves of Altamira - Steely Dan - What the Lyrics mean to me

I got into Physics to escape the irrational world of Man. In college, I modeled myself after Einstein, as my inspiration, a man who spent 99% of his time thinking about the world and analyzing it. Within this context, I feel huge kinship with Steely Dan:

"I recall when I was small
How I spent my days alone
The busy world was not for me
So I went and found my own
I would climb the garden wall
With a candle in my hand."

He leaves the world of men to go spelunking, to lose himself in the artifacts of an ancient world 20,000 years old.

"I'd hide inside a hall of rock and sand
On the stone an ancient hand
In a faded yellow-green
Made alive a worldly wonder
Often told but never seen."

There, inside the caves, he hides in the dark with his candle, where the ancient people and their lives come alive to him.

"Now and ever bound to labor
On the sea and in the sky
Every man and beast appeared
A friend as real as I."

The cave drawing, he is sure, will always be there for him, as escape from the outside world of "busy" people. Seeing all the drawings and artifacts are made real for him, like watching a movie of these ancient people. And they are his friends. The world in the cave is more real to him than the outside world.

"Before the fall when they wrote it on the wall
When there wasn't even any Hollywood
They heard the call
And they wrote it on the wall
For you and me we understood."

The chorus displays his awe and wonder at the lives of these people and how they recorded it for us to see and know that they were alive and lived real lives.

"Can it be this sad design
Could be the very same
A wooly man without a face
And a beast without a name."

And he wonders if he is actually looking at a sorrowful rendering of God, a bearded being with no name (just "God.'')

"Nothin' here but history
Can you see what has been done
Memory rush over me
Now I step into the sun."

My own personal interpretation of this is that the history he is witnessing on the cave walls has given him an alternate world to inhabit, to lose himself in. The history is now his life. It is HIS memories. And without even leaving the cave and his candle, he steps into the world and now lives in the sunshine of an alternate reality.