Act and Image

<p>How did humans develop the capacity for symbolic imagination? </p> <p>In this ground-breaking book Warren Colman provides a reformulation of archetypal symbols as emergent from humans' embodied and affective engagement with their social and material environment. Beginning with the oldest known figurative image in the world the 40000-year-old Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany he traces the emergence of symbolic imagination through the origins of language the growth of human sociality and co-operation and the creative use of material objects from the earliest stone tools through the cave paintings and figures of Upper Paleolithic Europe and beyond. This leads to a consideration of how the imaginal world of the spirit may have come into being not as separate from the material world but through active participation within a world alive with meaning. </p>