Springs are known to have been important to prehistoric people all over the world, but not just for practical reasons. They were widely understood to provide more than just a supply of drinking water for people, game and domestic animals. Water was seen as a reflector of images and thence a mirror on, and symbol of, life itself. But disturb the

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Paleolithic people had stories to tell. From about 40,000 years ago, and for approximately the next 25,000 years — a period 12 times longer than the Common Era — they conveyed these through images painted on cave walls, carved on ivory tusks, engraved and etched on stones and shells, and did so, as far as we can tell, all over Europe, Asia and... See more

Though our collective forgetting is enormous, it is mostly unremarkable to those who study the transmission of culture. What puzzles me, and others who study transmission, is why so much unwritten knowledge has survived. Despite the brittleness of cultural practices, skills proliferate with and without records, chaining generation to generation,... See more

Their insightful solution involved at least two stories: the first would emphasize the importance of the dead — as we know from early burial sites, people were already emotionally attached to those who had died and were concerned about the afterlife. The second would ensure that everyone unequivocally knew that their religious obligation was to... See more