Spivey speculates that, The people who made this statue lived in a harsh ice-age environment where features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable, and several similar statuettes collectively referred to as Venus figurines show that this exaggerated body image continued for millennia.
[6] Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran speculates that the reason for this lies in a neurological principle known as the supernormal stimulus, which Spivey demonstrates by replicating Nikolaas Tinbergen's experiment with Herring gull chicks.
When the chicks are shown a yellow stick with a single red line made to represent their mother's beak, they tap on it as they are programmed to do to demand food.
Mapped onto the wall at the unfinished Tomb of Amenhotep III's vizier Ramose he discovers the grid which dictated the precise proportions and composition of these images for three thousand years.
As revealed in an antique copy of Herodotus in St John's College Old Library, Greek sculptors learned the Egyptians' techniques and initially created truly realistic depictions of the human body, like Kritian Boy at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece.
Spivey states that, the Greeks discovered they had to do interesting things with the human form, such as distorting it in lawful ways, and examines the pioneering work of a sculptor and mathematician called Polyclitus, as exemplified in the Riace bronzes at the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia.
Spivey begins his investigation by travelling to the Cave of Altamira near the town of Santillana del Mar in Cantabria, Spain, where in 1879 a young girl's exclamation of Papa.
to her father, local amateur archeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, is explained to have meant that Maria had just become the first modern human to set eyes on the first gallery of prehistoric paintings ever to be discovered.
Spivey next travels to the Drakensberg Mountains of South Africa, where rock painting made 200 years ago by the San people and similarly dismissed as hunting scenes, are revealed by anthropologist David Lewis-Williams to contain many of the same unusual features.
19th century interviews with the San by German linguist Wilhelm Bleek reveal the importance of trance within their culture, an observation confirmed by Spivey after watching a shamanistic ritual performed by their present-day descendants in a village near Tsumkwe, Namibia far from the mountains.