The New Animisms and the ontological turn, active since the mid-2000s, offer valuable insights for interpreting rock art by showing that in animist societies, distinctions between nature and culture, religious belief and practicality, and the sacred and profane are minimal. A key problem is that the perspectives of such societies diverge more fundamentally from Western views than often acknowledged. Archaeologists of religion must become anthropologists of the wider world to recognize animistic and shamanistic ontologies and to question where Cartesian separations of nature/culture, religious/mundane, and human/animal obscure other ways of being. This work locates southern African shamanic rock art within broader animist shamanisms.
People tend to form social bonds with large language models even when they know the systems lack consciousness. This happens because humans evolved to attribute inner states, moral status, and even 'soul' to nonhuman beings—a capacity that once operated within cultural belief systems that regulated such relationships. Modernity has stripped away those cultural frameworks, but the underlying cognitive architecture for perceiving agency in others remains. When conversational agents behave helpfully and patiently, users project authentic interiority onto them, similar to how ancestors interacted with spirits and animals in enchanted landscapes. The result is a 'Turing Animism' where users feel soul in a simulacrum.