43 Quotes by James David Lewis-Williams

Primary consciousness is a kind of ‘remembered present’…

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.

Improved memory made possible the long-term recollection of dreams and visions and the construction of those recollections into a spirit world.

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 to make sense of the resultant stream of images.

Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.

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 images.

For the makers, the paintings and engravings were visions, not representations of visions.

In Lascaux and other sites, hoofs are depicted to show their underside, or hoofprint.

Under certain social circumstances, which may have varied from time to time and place to place, certain people (shamans) saw a relationship between the small, three-dimensional, projected mental images that they experienced at the far end of the intensified spectrum and fragments of animals that lay around their hearths.