That not exactly anywhere place called the mind.

The famous subterranean art shows of southern France and Spain, painted between 30,000 and 12,000 years ago.

When hunter-gatherers plunged inside the limestone flanks of the Dordogne and the Ariège, Lewis-Williams argued, they believed they were passing into a spirit zone. For them, the walls of the caves were ‘membranes’: running their eyes and hands over the passages’ bumps and hollows, they sensed the ghost-animals who dwelled within the rock. Painting them, ‘they reached out to their emotionally charged visions and tried to touch them, to hold them in place … They were not inventing images. They were merely touching what was already there.’ 

 It is an intrusion of the invisible that sets homo sapiens apart from other species. The making of one thing stand for another: where prehistoric evidence of that habit shows up, we infer that the agents knew – in the way that we know, and in a way that other creatures seemingly do not – what it is like to contemplate and to relate physical objects, on some plane distinct from the objects themselves. ‘Mind’ is the obvious label for that not exactly material zone.

 Perhaps understanding is located not in us alone, but in the world about us in the manner of water under the ground, of blood under the skin or the flame within fuel: perhaps it’s a stuff within objects, awaiting release.

Perhaps and perhaps not.