Overview

What does the breathtakingly beautiful art 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, seemingly from nowhere into the human story? The Mind in the Cave puts forward the most plausible explanation yet proposed for the origins of image-making and art. This is a masterful piece of detective work, casting light on the darkest mysteries of our earliest ancestors and on the nature of our own consciousness and experience.

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Combines a lifetime of archaeological research with the most recent insights into the workings of the human brain and the nature of consciousness.

The cave art of Europe and the Americas has fascinated and intrigued anthropologists and art lovers for decades. Since the discovery of Upper Palaeolithic art in the mid-nineteenth century, the ochre figure of the running bison has become a symbol for the human race in transition: the first step out of Neanderthal darkness and the first sign of the modern mind at work. The Mind in the Cave explores the beginnings of a consciousness capable of representational imagery and investigates the societies and environmental conditions which produced it. Drawing on disciplines as diverse as biology, religion, psychology and Marxism, Lewis-Williams presents comprehensive and fascinating arguments for the development of primitive societies from their art and social structure to their agriculture and mythology. This is a lovingly researched, carefully organised and brilliantly argued work, full of unusual detail and convincing explanation. A classic in the fields of art and anthropology. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

David Lewis-Williams is Professor Emeritus and Senior Mentor in the Rock Art Research Institute, University of the Witswatersrand, Johannesburg. Among his books are The Mind in the Cave, Inside the Neolithic Mind (with David Pearce) and The Shamans of Prehistory (with Jean Clottes).

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