[...]ding people down the pit into darknesses)

WE NOT ONLY LOOKED ‘AT’ ANIMALS, WE ALSO LOOKED ‘INSIDE’ THEM, realizing that they were more kin than indicated by our exteriors. (it wasn't Aristotle first who was performing such procedures)

attaching sounds to things/animals/species when they were not visible
(“Never ignore a sound!”)

inheritance (DNA, etc.) calls upon human society and imagination to invent its exact expressions.

human species’ “theme” is Paleolithic

(those who are “better” live in a natural environment and a cultural system that are closer to) meeting the “expectations” of the genes

Children at age six are typically anthropomorphic

trees structure space

**imagining the possibilities of something else being in there.
(how we were doing it? before fire)

“A meditative stillness that is good for the human soul, suggests poet Gary Snyder, was invented by motionless hunters. That moment of silent reverence comes also at the final death stroke when one succumbs to the cycle of life.” (Shepard)
[from predation to hunting (there is a huge epistemological shift) (matter of representation and interpretation)]

mammalian ecology

[(let's) risk everything (instead of risk-reducing) --- issues of representation and agency in thinking ‘with’ animals. textual, metaphor animal in Attar line of thinking]

a distant call in known terrain says it is the there, not the here, where attention should be paid. [far, origins of our tropes, metaphysics? abstraction? =/=? motionless hunters invented motionless meditative worship]
-(kinfolk in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)

a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the ability to control) the abyssal terror that itself would engulf them if they submitted to panic. ==> mind
-“self” emerged as the consequence of “participation,” a calculative and organizational relatoin of the individual within the group? (and perceiving the so-called “inanimate” entities) --- shaped by the game -- a participant amidst other participants oriented by the action
(David Abraham: Perception is Participation, in an animistic logic)

mind, memory, --> cognition and communication --> reference --> imitating the animal's calls ==> stylized performances ==> (a repertoire of) symbolized references (sign language?) ==> accumulation of synonims (--> we ar[...]