Big game hunting was paramount throughout the Ice Age. The Sami of Northern Scandinavia and Russia, today forced into farming and herding today, were still big game hunters in the seventeenth century CE. Travellers have accounted how parties of men, women, children and dogs drove hundreds of reindeer in corrals of piled rocks, and slaughtered them all in blood-soaked excitement. In our times, only a remainder of the Bambuti Pygmies of Africa still mobilizes the whole clan to drive game into nets.
At the end of the Ice Age, the large herds disappeared and foraging shifted to a wide variety of rodents, insects, fish, shells and plants. Collective drive hunting turned into more solitary observation and stalking, a new way of food gathering demanding its own world-image.
Reality was made up of appearances. It was laden with the unexpected, set forth in a manifold of particular, surprising experiences and recounts. Coming to terms with this environment requires careful reading of covert signs, searching for hidden relations, and marking thin threads of recurrence and resemblance in a turmoil of perceptions. This environment was too complex to ever be confronted entirely. Yet, it had a decisive impact on food, health and safety.
Ancient foragers re-enacted, replayed, strengthened, extended and exchanged those encounters: rhythmic repetition created an illusive universe, steadily expanded by fresh signs. Words were caused accidentally, by the need to recount - not as sounds obtaining meanings, but as meanings acquiring sounds, each meaning its own sound at its own time. Evocations grew into patterns and tokens, and into language and myths. First was art, then came words, and then came myths.
Those people were not actors themselves, but were totally predisposed at responding to the agile environment. However puzzling the behaviour of encountered entities, it was essential to make the best out of the world as it appeared; good and bad were no directives, they rather were a challenge to the forager’s creativity. This world-image was designed to provide the best possible life, nothing less and nothing more.


