A replica painting from the Spanish cave of Altamira, home to numerous paintings of contemporary local fauna and human hands created between 18,500 and 14,000 years ago during the Upper Paleolithic period.
Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Ancient cave painters sometimes made elaborate images in dark, narrow corridors that were navigable only with artificial light. Hardly optimal conditions for an artist. Why would Picassos of the Late Stone Age even try to draw in such dimly lit, hard-to-reach spaces? According to a new study, they knew that the environments would deprive oxygen and become high.
They are “motivated by the understanding of the transforming nature of an underground, oxygen-depleted space,” archaeologists from Tel Aviv University said in the study, which appeared in the latest issue of Time and Mind: The Journal of Archeology, Consciousness and Culture. The research helped the oxygen deficient to exploit their deepest, most complex levels of creativity.
In many indigenous societies, active connection to the cosmos and environment is considered the key to individual and communal well-being and adaptation. “It was not the decoration that made the caves significant,” says the study. “The importance of the chosen caves was rather the reason for its decoration.”
When the body’s obligatory blood-oxygen concentration drops below a certain level, hypoxia ensues. It is a potentially life-threatening condition that can cause a variety of biological and cognitive changes, including increased dopamine, hallucinations, and euphoria. The researchers believe that artists from between 14,000 and 40,000 years ago illuminated the inner depths of their caves with flickering torches, knowing that the fire would lower the oxygen levels in the already poorly ventilated spaces. Some art has been found in areas involving stairs, narrow moldings crossing and even shafts that have sunk a few feet deep.
The researchers studied ornate caves discovered in Western Europe in the 19th century to further interpret and investigate the enduring mysteries of cave art that motivated these very early artists. Many of the statues were painted in black and red, or engraved on soft walls or hard surfaces. They mostly depict animals, but also hand stencils, handprints and abstract geometric signs.
Not all cave art appears in deep, dark recesses – some decorate walls near entrances or shelters. But the art in remote cave areas that is not used for daily household activities is the most interested researchers like Yafit Kedar, a doctor. candidate in the Department of Archeology of Tel Aviv University.
She is the one who theorizes the artists, deliberately induced hypoxia to bring about a changed state of consciousness.
To investigate her hypothesis, Kedar and her fellow scientists simulated the effect of flares on oxygen concentrations in confined spaces such as in the upper Paleolithic caves. They found that oxygen levels in narrow corridors or single-passage halls dropped rapidly to below 18%, the level known to cause hypoxia in humans.
It was a great year for cave art, which has a lot to tell us about how our ancestors lived and thought. Earlier this year, researchers identified an image of a warthog pig from 45,500 years ago that they say is the world’s oldest cave painting and the earliest known version of the animal world.
The last few years have brought other exciting discoveries of ancient drawings, though non-formative, including one found in South Africa 73,000 years ago, which looks like a hashtag and another between 2100 and 4100 BC that man ‘s amazement at a stellar explosion.