One can imagine the numinosity of the cave for paleolithic humans. One enters the cave and discovers the huge and hibernating bear and kills it when it is utterly vulnerable in its winter trance. Either out of awe or remorse, these ancient humans set up an altar to hold the bear’s skull and mandible, and put on the skin as a ceremonial cloak for the shaman. In other words, “We slay with technology, and save the victim with art” – which is my own aphoristic way of responding to McLuhan’s tetrad, or his aphorism that the sloughed-off environment becomes a work of art in the new and invisible environment. The trance state also becomes the chosen medium for the shaman to leave his body and take on the body of the animal spirit in rituals of animal possession. In sculpture and painted images on the cave walls, we see just such half-man, half-animal icongraphy.

Humans have two hemispheres, and two modes of archaic expression – sign and sound – and both co-evolve together in the causal process that the Buddhists at the time of Nagarjuna called dependent co-origination, pratityasamutpadha. Similarly, tool manufacture and language also co-evolve and bring forth the emergent domain of archaic human culture: to make a rock conform to the class of fist-hatchets, a hominid’s actions shift its membership from one class to another.