Throughout his long and distinguished career, Paul Shepard addressed the most fundamental question of life: Who are we? An oft-repeated theme of his writing is what he saw as the central fact of our existence: that our genetic heritage, formed by three million years of hunting and gathering, remains essentially unchanged. Shepard argued that this, "our wild Pleistocene genome," influences everything from human neurology and ontogeny to our pathologies, social structure, myths, and cosmology.

While Shepard's writings travel widely across the intellectual landscape, exploring topics as diverse as aesthetics, the bear, hunting, perception, agriculture, human ontogeny, history, animal rights, domestication, post-modern deconstruction, tourism, vegetarianism, the iconography of animals, the Hudson River school of painters, human ecology, theoretical psychology, and metaphysics, the fundamental importance of our genetic makeup is the predominant theme of this collection.