Choice Review

What is more compelling than 20,000-year-old Upper Paleolithic rock art? Celebrated paintings from French caves offer a glimpse of very ancient life, yet how are we to understand the intellectual gifts and aesthetic motivations of such early artists? In this compilation of papers from a career of fertile thought, Lewis-Williams (Univ. of Witwatersrand) presents provocative hypotheses through comparison with southern African rock art, suggesting that many Upper Paleolithic scenes portray altered states of consciousness universal to the human nervous system. Those who have challenged Lewis-Thomas's extension of the ethnography of contemporary San people to explain southern African rock art will undoubtedly balk at these broader speculations; yet what is deemed "real" to Western thinking is unlikely to have been obtained in Upper Paleolithic times, Lewis-Thomas asserts, and his analysis of the "wounded men" images of Upper Paleolithic caves reveals how revolutionary his approach can be. Rather than illustrating the circumstances of mundane hunting and gathering, cave artists may have given visual form to ineffable spiritual transcendence. Readers will wonder how "real" their own dreams and visions are, for beyond his plausible explanations of long-gone practices, Lewis-Thomas offers a stimulating archaeology of early minds. General readers and most academic collections. A. F. Roberts University of California, Los Angeles