According to Berman, the Paleolithic human being saw the animal as an Other, but one with whom s/he was intimately identified. In fact, the earliest humans were so deeply immersed in the animal world that it might be plausible to say that, in a sense, they were more animal-like than human. “Animal life was everywhere, even in the skies,” says Berman, and “animal movement, the animal body, was the model of human expression in hunter-gatherer society.” It is not surprising then that “the first art, which can be seen in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux, is about animal subjects rather than human ones.”

(back to Chapter 6)