“ For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions. James David Lewis-Williams
“ In southern Africa, a great many figures are ithyphallic. This feature has generally – and rather vaguely – been taken to refer to ‘masculinity’, but the painted contexts of the figures seems to confi… James David Lewis-Williams
“ Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages. James David Lewis-Williams
“ Some researchers believe that dreaming is what happens when sensory input to the brain is greatly diminished: the brain then ‘freewheels’, synapses firing more or less at random, and the brain tries t… James David Lewis-Williams
“ Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world. James David Lewis-Williams
“ I believe it is reasonable to assume that higher-order consciousness developed neurologically in Africa before the second wave of emigration to the Middle East and Europe. James David Lewis-Williams
“ Primary consciousness is a state of being aware of things in the world – of having mental images in the present.But it is not accompanied by any sense of a person with a past and future… James David Lewis-Williams
“ The cerebral cortex, the outer ‘skin’ of the brain, contains as many as ten billion neurons. This complexity is daunting. Yet it is out of complex interactions between the billions of neurons that con… James David Lewis-Williams
“ Consciousness has evolved biologically and can therefore be explained biologically. James David Lewis-Williams
“ Around 30,000 years ago, in the Aurignacian, at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, someone or some group in the Eyzies region invented drawing, the representation in two dimensions on the flat o… James David Lewis-Williams
“ The notion that an image is a scale model of something else (say, a horse) requires a different set of mental events and conventions from those that perceive the social symbolism of red marks on someo… James David Lewis-Williams
“ Perhaps the most striking feature of the west European Upper Palaeolithic, one on which many writers comment, is a sharp increase in the rate of change. Compared with the preceding Middle Palaeolithic… James David Lewis-Williams
“ Shamanism is not simply a component of society: on the contrary, shamanism, together with its tiered cosmos, can be said to be the overall framework of society. James David Lewis-Williams
“ The first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were ‘fixed’ mental i… James David Lewis-Williams
