The primitive shaman shaking his rattle around the head of the patient prefigures, and perhaps results in, the neurosurgeon with his scalpel, millennia later. The attention, the will to accomplish something, is being preserved within the human condition within time, or perhaps acting within time, and being understood by the people within each time in a different manner. An inner realism.
Perhaps every aspect of the human exists in every age (and culture), however obliquely.