Ebook: How the Shaman Stole the Moon: In Search of Ancient Prophet-Scientists from Stonehenge to the Grand Canyon

Neurobiologist William H. Calvin is acclaimed as one of the best of today ’s popular scientist writers. Making current theories accessible to nonscientists in works such as The Throwing Madonna and The Cerebral Symphony, Dr. Calvin has examined the human brain and prehistory to unlock the most baffling mysteries of human life. His recent The Ascent of Mind traveled the world for clues to the forces that transformed the ape brain into the human mind. Now, in How the Shaman Stole the Moon, he looks to the heavens — and to some of the most ancient ruins on earth — to explore the shamanistic practices that started humankind on the path to scientific knowledge and modern civilization.

Standing on Salisbury Plain amid the great monoliths of Stonehenge, Dr Calvin ponders the sites reputation as a neolithic computer. Eclipses of the sun and the moon were likely important, even frightening, natural events to our prehistoric ancestors, and his visit to Stonehenge launches Dr. Calvin’s quest to discover "how the shaman stole the moon": how ancient peoples around the globe came to forecast eclipses and unlock the mysteries of the heavens. His search leads to Avebury, the Temples of Poseidon and Delphi, and the American Southwest ruins in Chaco Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, Mesa Verde, and the Grand Canyon — mysterious sites that have inspired awe and fascination in visitors and scientists for hundreds of years.

With an archaeologist's sharp observations and a naturalist's love of the magnificent land, Dr. Calvin takes the reader with him into caves inhabited a thousand years ago, into sacred “kivas,” and through little-known cliff cities even more impressive than the famous Mesa Verde, far from the path taken by tourists. As he did in his previous books, he looks to the natural world to illuminate behavior and the workings and development of the human mind, especially human abilities to look ahead to tomorrow. Using sticks, stones, leaves, and shining jewels, Dr. Calvin re-creates how the early Native Americans and Celts might also have tracked and predicted