Speculations about the meaning and purpose of prehistoric art ① rely heavily on analogies drawn with modern-day hunter-gatherer societies. Such primitive societies, ② as Steven Mithen emphasizes in The Prehistory of the Modern Mind, tend to view man and beast, animal and plant, organic and inorganic spheres, as participants in an integrated, animated totality. The dual expressions of this tendency are anthropomorphism (the practice of regarding animals as humans) and totemism (the practice of regarding humans as animals), both of ③ which spread through the visual art and the mythology of primitive cultures. Thus the natural world is conceptualized in terms of human social relations. When considered in this light, the visual preoccupation of early humans with the nonhuman creatures ④ inhabited their world becomes profoundly meaningful. Among hunter-gatherers, animals are not only good to eat, they are also good to think about, as Claude Lévi-Strauss has observed. In the practice of totemism, he has suggested, an unlettered humanity “broods upon ⑤ itself and its place in nature.”

* speculation: 고찰 ** analogy: 유사점

*** brood: 곰곰이 생각하다