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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Possible Million-Year-Old Tools Unearthed in Sudan Could Change Human History
Ancient tools have been discovered in eastern Africa that are possibly a million years old. What can this discovery teach us about our ancient history?
A recent gold rush in eastern Africa has led to open-pit mines where gold hunters have stumbled upon a different kind of fortune: hundreds of stone tools, including Acheulean hand axes, cleavers, and other tools. The head of the study, Professor Mirosław Masojć from the Institue of Archaeology at the University of Wraclaw, Poland said, “[t]he layers of soil around the tools were at least seven-hundred-thousand years old.”
But some have speculated that the tools could be up to one million years old. This discovery puts our ancient ancestor Homo erectus in this area twice as far back as previously thought.
