Recent DNA analyses have revealed that humans share a majority of our genetic makeup with other animals. Physically speaking, our similarities with our fellow beings far outweigh our differences. In the Western mindset, however, a sharp line is drawn between human beings and other animals. Because they do not communicate in our language, it is thought, we do not have much in common beyond physical structure. For Westerners, only humans have a soul, a wide range of emotions, and the unique capacities of reason, imagination, and the changing of our environment on a grand scale to meet our needs. Despite the division in our thinking, we still have intimate relationships with the animals closest to us and cannot seem to resist anthropomorphizing them. There are several societies whose conception of humans' place in the animal world is far different from ours. Although these kinds of belief systems are widely varied, many see us as more closely related to other creatures, both physically and spiritually. Here, I will examine a few of these non-Western ideologies and compare their conceptions of the human-animal relationship to each other and to Western ideas. Several cultures which hold traditionally animistic religious beliefs share the concept of a time long ago during which humans were animals and vice versa. In this "Distant Time," "Dreamtime" or "Mythtime," as it is variously referred to, animals were able to take human form. Most animals, it is believed, once possessed human souls, and some cultures think that they still do, although the average person is now unable to perceive them. Folklorist Charles L. Edwards hints that this idea may have evolved out of a memory of a much earlier period in the evolution of the human species, when the common ancestor of both humans and apes roamed the earth. This apelike being lived no differently from the other predatory mammals who shared his environment. Some of his offspring later began the process of change and adaptation that would produce our species. "In outwitting his foes, instead of throttling them the diverging elementary man began to make plans of strategy." As their thought process grew more complex, Edwards argues, early humans expanded their thinking beyond their immediate surroundings and contemplated the unseen forces that governed their world. "[T]hese forces took form in the gods who dwelt beyond the clouds, and the myths of cosmogony and transformation arose." Now, when people belonging to animistic traditions look for ways of explaining the phenomena around them and of connecting their rituals to the greater processes of continuing cyclical transformation, they recall the time when myths were formed, when humans were much closer to other animals than we are today. Edwards connects the deep sense of spiritual communion with other beings out of which myth and belief in the supernatural arise to the formative period in the development of each human being known as childhood. He relates a story of his own childhood and the time he spent watching ants in his backyard, inventing stories to match the escapades of "the ant-people." He envisions them as soldiers engaged in various industries at peacetime, but in wartime displaying "remarkable valor and extraordinary strategy." This depth of imagination, which is now the exclusive domain of children, is the fertile ground from which spring "the miracles of transformation" and the deeper sense of connection through the anthropomorphism of playful storymaking. "So we see in the child, as in primitive people [sic], the projection of his own fancies born of fear, or love, or desire, into the things about him which then become personified." For many non-Westerners, the rituals associated with storytelling and traditional practice comprise an extension and evolution of childhood, where the wonder and intimacy in the natural world they experienced as children develops into a greater understanding of ourselves and other forms of life. Most Western adults are, on the surface, all too eager to put childhood behind them. Our deep longing to connect to the wider life community manifests itself in other ways, though, such as our feelings towards our companion animals.