When hunting for food, our ancient ancestors ensured that it was not just the animal’s meat that was used in a meaningful way.
Highly respected and treated as a wellspring of life, a harvest would have multi-purposes – whether as food, shelter, clothing or relics. In this vein, the practice of displaying skulls for decoration, or even as structural components of dwellings, can be traced back to Cro-Magnon man’s use of mammoth bones 25,000 years ago.
Significant too, 11,000-year-old spiritualised deer masks have been discovered at a Mesolithic archaeological site in North Yorkshire, England. These artefacts are thought to be the oldest traces of shamanic and religious behaviour in the world.
