Across thousands of years, civilizations refine their stories into symbols... layers of distortion, memory, and meaning. On temple walls in Egypt, motifs appear that may echo something functional, not merely decorative: recurring shapes, instruments, even forms resembling tuning forks. If nature produces intelligence in crows and other species far from primates, evolution offers no guarantee that only one lineage achieves high sophistication. The past may hold traces of minds and technologies un