More titles to consider  Shopping Cart    Goes to the heart of
contemporary arguments about the "primitive" and the "modern"
minds, and draws new social, anthropological, and ethnographic
conclusions about the nature of ancient societies.  How did
ancient peoples—those living before written records—think? Were
their thinking patterns fundamentally different from ours today?
Researchers over the years have certainly believed so. Along
with the Aborigines of Australia, the indigenous San people of
southern Africa—among the last hunter-gatherer societies on
Earth—became iconic representatives of all our distant ancestors
and were viewed as either irrational fantasists or childlike,
highly spiritual conservationists.  Since the 1960s a new wave
of research among the San and their world-famous rock art has
overturned these misconceived ideas. Here, the great authority
David Lewis-Williams and his colleague Sam Challis reveal how
analysis of the rock paintings and engravings can be made to
yield vital insights into