The mind in the cave : consciousness and the origins of art by J David Lewis-Williams
The breathtakingly beautiful art created deep inside the caves of western Europe in the late Ice Age provokes awe and wonder in equal measure. What do these animals and symbols, depicted on the walls of caves such as Lascaux, Chauvet, and Altamira, tell us about the nature of the ancestral mind? How did these images spring, sophisticated and fully formed, seemingly from nowhere, into the human story? David Lewis-Williams skillfully interweaves a lifetime of anthropological research with the most recent neurological insights to offer a convincing account of how we became human and, in the process, began to make art.