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who is looking either for souls, or for information or favors from the master or mistress of animals regarding successful hunting or fishing or the arrival of rain; to do this, the shaman requires the help of a spirit. And, of all this, one can know nothingâ¦Shamanism and totemism are phenomena much too particular to be affirmed in the absence of written dataâ (p. 172â73). Vitebsky (1995) writes: âThe ideas surrounding shamans are so complex and subtle that it takes all the efforts of anthropologists working among living people to discover them, and even then there are many dangers of misunderstanding. It is possible that Paleolithic hunters had shamans in their communities, but the theory cannot be proved. It seems unquestionable that, until the development of agriculture, all human societies were based on hunting and in recent history shamanism has had a particularly strong link with the hunting way of life. This is not, however, a simple and exclusive connectionâ (p. 29). Bahn and Vertut (1998) write: âThe realization that motifs and motives in Paleolithic art are not easily recognizable has meant researchers have found it ever harder to move beyond detailed descriptions and well-meant speculations. What it comes down to, basically, is whether one is content to work with the art as a body of markings that cannot be read, or whether one wants to have stories made up about it!â (p. 21).

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P. 38: HYBRID SIGNS WITH A MULTIPLICITY OF MEANINGS

Giedion (1957) writes: âMasks and hybrid figures have this in common: it is impossible to determine them with any exactitude. It is impossible to come near to their meaning without bringing in the essential factor of indetermination. Indetermination between the real and the imaginary constitutes their rightful being, their rightful nature. It is related to the hovering indefinite forms which appear so often in primeval art and are a means of giving expression to relations with the supernatural. With the symbols, multiplicity of meanings hindered an understanding of their significance. With the hybrid figures, on the contrary, it is the very factor of indetermination which gives the key to a comprehension of primeval religious concepts. Primeval man remained enveloped in a marvelous unity of existence that embraced both the sacred and the profaneâ (p. 511â12).

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P. 38: KINSHIP WITH NATURE ESTABLISHED BY SCIENCE

Wilson (1993) writes: âOther species are our kin. This statement is literally true in evolutionary time. All higher eukaryotic organisms, from flowering plants to insects to humanity itself, are thought to have descended from a single ancestral population that lived about 1.8 billion years ago. Single-celled eukaryotes and bacteria are linked by still more remote ancestors. All this distant kinship is stamped by a common genetic code and elementary features of cell structure. Humanity did not soft-land into the teeming biosphere like an alien from another planet. We arose from other organisms already hereâ (p. 39, original italics). Wade (1998) writes: âMice are a lot like people. It took the advance of science to prove this humbling truth. Generations of men have prided themselves on being martial, mighty, menacing, magnificentâin a word, unmouselike. Geneticists now know better. The instructions to develop and operate a human require three billion chemical letters of DNA, the genetic material. But mice, too, have three billion letters of DNA in each of their cells, as if their design plan were every bit as sophisticated. For every 100 human genes, 97 or more have counterparts in the mouse, and these mouse genes, in the language of DNA, are spelled very similarly to the human genes. Indeed, the common ancestor of mice and humans lived only 75 million years ago. This genetic cousinship makes mice ideal for medical studies. At every level, from gene to cell to physiology, they work the same way humans doâ (p. WK 5). Mouse Genome Sequencing Consortium (2002), which revealed the complete sequence of the mouse genome, writes: âThe proportion of mouse genes without any homologue