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Numerous San rock paintings apparently enter or leave the rock face. Neuropsychological and ethnographic evidence suggests that San shamans visited the spirit world via a tunnel that, in some instances, started at the walls of rock shelters. Shaman-artists depicted some of the visions they brought back from the spirit world as if they were emerging from the rock face. An implication of this conclusion is that the rock was as meaningful a ritual element as the paint: anything painted on the walls of rock shelters was thus placed in a shamanistic context.