Inside the Animal Mind
A Groundbreaking Exploration of Animal Intelligence
From Altamira to Anthropomorphism
In the beginning, our lives were totally immersed in the world of animals. In the beginning, in fact, we were animals, in the colloquial as well as the technical sense of that word. Our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon ancestors relied on birds and beasts for food and clothing; they went to the mat one-on-one with tigers and bison and bears, and they took heavy casualties. We were an integral part of a world that was "red in tooth and claw." Surely it is no coincidence that our oldest surviving visual art?the cave paintings at Altamira, Lascaux, and other sites in southern Europe?depict cattle, horses, bison, and deer as objects of hunting and veneration. Animals predominate; there are very few human figures in any of this work. Then there is the idea that our earliest music might have been created in response to the myriad sounds of the natural world. After all, those were the only sounds we heard: There weren't any jets, jackhammers, or jukeboxes around, but there were songbirds in profusion. No wonder Orpheus, the beguiling musician of Greek my ...
read full excerpt from: Inside the Animal Mind ebook
