Ancient Cave Painters Starved Themselves of Oxygen to Hallucinate

Ancient Cave Painters Starved Themselves of Oxygen to Hallucinate

Did pre-historic man communicate with non-human entities? An exciting new archeological study may have just found an answer.

Caves have always been a source of fascination, as have the paintings drawn in them by the earliest humans. There’s been much debate among archeologists over the meaning of the paintings as well as why so many were made in the deepest, hard-to-reach parts of the caves.

A team from Tel Aviv University set out in search of the answer.

Archeologist Ron Barkai led the study which focused on caves painted in Spain and France some 40,000 years ago.

“We were wondering about human relationships with caves. Caves are not only shelters from the elements. We believe that caves had much more deeper meanings for early humans. And the riddle why people entered deep, dark caves was always on the table. “Barkai said.

“And then we came to realize that the use of torches must have reduced the level of oxygen inside the caves, which brings a well-known phenomenon which is called hypoxia. And one of the consequences of hypoxia is an altered state of consciousness,” he said.

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Amateur Historian Finds Ancient City & Discovery Changes Human Timeline

The timeline of history changes again, as new evidence pushes the oldest known Homo sapiens in Africa back thousands of years. 

In southwestern Ethiopia, a mystery nearly a quarter of a million years in the making has been solved. Homo sapien remains found near the Omo river, dubbed “Omo 1,” were originally found in the 1960s. Scientists struggled for years to establish a date for these remains, but in 2005 they determined Omo was approximately 195,000 years old.  

Now, a new study by volcanologist Dr. Celine Vidal of Cambridge University pushes that date much farther back by more than 30,000 years, which places modern humans in eastern Africa more than 230,000 years ago.

Vidal was able to determine this by comparing the thick layers of ash left by an ancient volcano from the top of the remains of Omo 1 with ash known to be from a volcano that erupted about 230,000 years ago. Now that the minimum date for Homo sapiens in eastern Africa has been established, researchers are searching for the maximum.

As, Christine Lane, a co-author of the study stated,  “[I]t’s possible that new finds and new studies may extend the age of our species even further back in time.”

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