Again - Imagination, art, belief, ritual

Yesterday I posted a video by anthropologist Wade Davis but it somehow got deleted. Here it is again below. What I found most interesting was what Wade said near the beginning of the video, which made me think of our response to The Fall .......

"I spent two months in a cave in southwest France with a poet, Clayton Eshleman, who wrote a beautiful book, Juniper Fuse [Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld], and you could look at this art [Paleolithic art in slides shown] and of course see the complex social organization of the people that brought it into being, but more importantly, it spoke of a deeper yearning, something far more sophisticated than hunting magic. And the way Clayton put it was this way - he said, you know, clearly at some time we were all of an animal nature and at some point we weren't. And he viewed proto-shamanism as a kind of original attempt through ritual to rekindle a connection that had been irrevocably lost. So he saw the art not as hunting magic but as postcards of nostalgia. And viewed in that light it takes on a whole new resonance. And the most amazing thing about the upper Paleolithic art is that as an aesthetic expression, it lasted for almost twenty thousand years. If these were postcards of nostalgia, ours was a very long farewell indeed."