"…Yet we should be wary of getting wrapped up in the practicality of it all. For that hardly explains the mythology, the fact that this or that feature of the landscape is a sacred place, that the Songlines were traced by culture heroes of animal nature. None of that is necessary for the merely practical end of accurate time-keeping, though it might be useful to have a story to give some content to the narrative stream. To measure a long stretch of time, and thus a long distance, one could simply count to some sufficiently high number while walking and singing at a steady pace. Counting to an arbitrarly high value, however, is a relatively recent human accomplishment, one not present in preliterate cultures. One could also use very long strings of nonsense syllables, but they are very difficult to memorize accurately, as thousands of undergraduates in decades of psychological experiments know all too well; such things simply don’t have much purchase in the human brain. So one sings the song of a culture hero’s journey, while tracing that journey oneself, and in the process, one becomes that hero. We are in the world Val Geist hypothesized, in which our ancestors imitated the calls of animals in order to manipulate animal behavior. In the process of imagining the wilderness though the persona of an animal one assimilates that wilderness to the categories and needs of human culture."