Salty scent of ocean tides mix with warm desert breezes and sparse vegetation growing in a channeled field of stones. Animal and human footprints crisscross
the muddy ground. Mazes and human figures with bird feet and heads radiating
beams of sun ride the eroding rocks.

Who walked this way, sat for days, no food, no water, no sleep;
then stood and began to paint? Is that Coyote howling,
or a shaman taking flight to the stars?

Can anthropologists track ancient lifeways through indigenous art, or by filling notebooks with informants' remarks, if the "invisible must announce
itself as the invisible of the visible, must leave its inscription on the visible,
must show a trace there amidst the shining of the visible."?
These rocks crumble in a Museum of Natural History.

We must be able to see the major ancestral beings are referentially complex entities.
They frequently have no set form but transform from animal or inanimate form to human form
and back at different stages of the myth. Often it is not so much a matter
of transformation from one state to another: different accounts, songs,
dances, paintings seem different states of being at high
noon, sunrise or sunset, or in the eerie
cast of a full moon at midnight.

If, as "some believe, man before the Upper Palaeolithic had little need to mark out specific places as holy or to be revered, because to him all of Earth was sacred," by mythologizing the supernatural, parsing "sacred" from "profane,"
modern humans began to believe that the natural world
is other than themselves.