For some anthropologists, most notably Louis Liebenberg, an accomplished tracker himself, the tracks in the archaeological and fossil records are clear. He is of the view that Homo erectus must have hunted in this way and that this form of hunting must also have played a part in making us bipedal—in molding our bodies for long-distance running, in developing the ability to cool our bodies with sweat, and adapting our minds to the challenges of inferring meaning from this, the most ancient form of writing.

To foragers, change was immanent in the environment—it happened all the time, when the wind blew, the rain fell, or an elephant cleared a new path. But change was always constrained by a deeper sense of confidence in the continuity and predictability of the world around them. Every season was different from those that preceded it, yet these differences always fell within a range of predictable changes. Thus for the Ju/’hoansi, when they were still free to forage as their ancestors had, carrying the weight of history was as inconvenient as carrying a house around, and abandoning the deep past freed them to engage with the world around them unencumbered by ancient precedents or future ambitions.

Almost all societies that depended on hunting for meat considered animals to have souls of a sort, even if they weren’t always exactly the same as human souls. Many also considered the fact that hunters were in effect harvesters of souls to be morally troubling and came up with a different way to rationalize the killing. This is why for instance Inuit and Siberian foragers like the Yukhagir insisted that the animals they hunted often gifted themselves to humans for food and other animal products, while hunters like the Ju/’hoansi took the view that most of the animals they pursued were complex thinking creatures and so also afforded them the dignity of a soul or at least, as the Ju/’hoansi put it, a kind of life force.

I speak to maps. And sometimes they say something back to me. This is not as strange as it sounds, nor is it an unheard of thing. Before maps the world was limitless. It was maps that gave it shape and made it seem like territory, like something that could be possessed, not just laid waste and plundered. Maps made places on the edges of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map.

In his commencement address to Kenyon College in 2005, the writer David Foster Wallace used a parable to point out an indelible truth:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

Every culture—from the broad culture of a nation down to the culture inside a family—is at least partially invisible to its participants. There are important assumptions, value judgments, and practices that create the water we swim in without our noticing or agreeing to them. We simply find ourselves in this world, and we move forward. These features of culture affect just about everything in our lives, often in positive ways, connecting us to each other and creating identities and meaning. But there is a flip side. Sometimes cultural messages and practices point us in directions away from well-being and happiness.