When it comes to an art gallery, a cave is a strange place. Many ancient cave paintings, which are the first known examples of works of art by hominides, are so deep underground that it would have taken extraordinary effort to see them. If you’re an old artist, what can inspire you to paint scenes of life – things like horses, kangaroos and a wart pig in the case of the oldest known cave painting – so few, if any, people see?
As it turns out, Israeli archaeologists may have found the answer. Long story short, the artists stumbled – literally.
According to a new paper in “Time and Mind: The Journal of Archeology, Consciousness and Culture” by archaeologists from Tel Aviv University, the people who braved these underground fences during the Upper Paleolithic (50,000 to 12,000 years ago) would have to light torches to see what they were doing. In the process, they would have reduced the amount of oxygen in the caves, causing hypoxia (oxygen deficiency) in their brains. This would have put them back in a state of altered consciousness, and experienced euphoria, out-of-body experiences and perhaps even hallucinations.
However, our ancestors would not have understood the science behind it all. Therefore, the Israeli researchers speculate that they would probably have understood their experience as metaphysical in nature. Indeed, there are many people today who believe that they have had spiritual experiences when they change their minds or enter a ‘trippy’ environment, even with the scientific knowledge we currently have about why our brains respond in certain ways.
The researchers speculate that the people responsible for these drawings believed that there was something special about the caves themselves.
“We discuss the importance of caves in indigenous worldviews and claim that access to these deep, dark environments was a conscious choice, motivated by the understanding of the transformative nature of an underground, oxygen-depleted space,” the authors write. The people who used it would have seen the caves as sacred spaces, places that deserve awe and reverence.
“It was not the decoration that made the caves meaningful,” the authors write. “The importance of the chosen caves was rather the reason for its decoration.”
In a separate article, the authors write that ‘the rock wall itself, inside the cave or the rock face, was considered a membrane, a tissue that connects the here-and-now world and the underground world outside,’ according to the Israeli publication Haaretz.
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Gil Kedar, one of the co-authors of the newspaper, told Haaretz that it first occurred to her that the cave painters were possibly tall because she visited rock art sites in Europe and was constantly thinking about how difficult it was to get to them. to come out.
“I wondered why they entered the darkness, in such seclusion – why do we go a mile inside the end?” Ask Kedar. “These caves are terrifying, with narrow passages, and I shook my head.”
It is important to note that the hypothesis of the new paper does not take cave art into account, as lighting a torch would not cause hypoxia. Nor is it the first time scholars have speculated that ancient cave painters are less than sober.
That said, the only possible evidence of this before the new article – which tested the theories using data on the effects of hypoxia in high-altitude environments and software that mimicked the conditions within the small Paleolithic caves – comes from, appropriately enough , California. In November, an international research team revealed that chilled cotton wool from datura, a plant that acts as a delirium, was trapped in the ceiling cracks of a place known as Pinwheel Cave. These drawings would probably be made by a Native American group known as the Chumash.