It seems we often like to imagine our ancestors (of say, 2000 + years ago) as though their minds were essentially like our own. They were not. Their experience of consciousness… particularly prior to and during the early onset of the emergence of perspective in art… was a profoundly different experience of awareness than what we, in the ‘primarily mental’ phase of the development of human consciousness ordinarily experience.

We are, in a sense, like trees with their rings, in that each one of us conserves the entire developmental ladder of human consciousness, accessibly, within us. But we have no idea … in general… how to access the ‘other rings’. Thankfully, whether or not we can do it ‘on purpose’, dreaming does some of this for us…

…in any case, what our distant ancestors experienced as consciousness was nothing like what we experience. Their minds and common experience of consciousness were fundamentally different, in ways that we must recover from within ourselves in order to understand. The ultimate archaeologist… is you. And you also happen to be the ultimate ‘dig site’, too.