If humans have two modes of expression through sign and sound, we need to recognize that space is separating and sound uniting. Through chant or music, we feel exalted out of our isolated spatial condition; we become at one with the universe, transfigured in a Hallelujah Chorus. A chant in a place like Chauvet Cave or Lascaux would enhance trance states, and for the archaic self, which was probably much more labile than the modern ego, entry into these states was probably not difficult. And here we also need to recognize that there is more to Mind than consciousness; consciousness is the phase-space of the perceptual-motor system, but, as every mystic knows, there are forms of Buddhic-mind that are first of sound, then of light – that are not figure-ground constructed in the perspectival syntax of self and world. This is difficult for non-meditators to understand, but a more accessible example of non-conscious participation in an ambience of sound has been reported recently by scientists doing research on neonates in a hospital in Helsinki. The scientists put little electroencephalograph bonnets on neonates and discovered that while the infants were sleeping their brains were still at work processing the sounds and phonological distinctions of their native language.¹⁰ So, when a nursing mother is singing a lullaby to her infant, the infant is taking in language along with its mother’s milk in precisely the way Wordsworth described in The Prelude.¹¹ The origins of language do not come from Man the Hunter, who needs to be silent as he stalks his prey, but in the humming and nursing mother at the home base, where mothers and grandmothers, through nursing and gathering, contributed far more to human evolution than the excessively celebrated man the hunter – the great meat-eating, killer ape of the narratives favoured by male, suburban, barbeque-cooking anthropologists.

Other research on neonates has discovered that they recognize faces, can mimic gestures – such as the sticking out of the tongue – and that they move their arms and legs on their backs in rhythm to the pulses of the sound of the mother’s speech. Music and dance are therefore not representative arts, but ontic arts; they are performances of our basic ontology, and we start to dance and babble within days of our birth.

What we also can see from the image of the bison in Chauvet Cave is that this art is fine right from the start. Leroi-Goruhan’s notion from the 1960s that there was a developmental progression from primitive to advanced, no longer computes. Chauvet Cave is as advanced as Lascaux, which comes almost 14,000 years later.