PALEOLITHIC CAVE ART: STUDY SUGGESTS CAVEMEN MAY HAVE BEEN "HIGH" DUE TO HYPOXIA

People have been fascinated by caves since time immemorial. Yet why would a cave dweller tens of thousands of years ago venture hundreds of meters into the lightless underground, and why draw anything there? Ruth Schuster wrote for Haaretz on April 8, 2021.

A groundbreaking paper published by Yafit Kedar and Ran Barkai of Tel Aviv University with independent researcher Gil Kedar in Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture suggests an explanation.

The paper posits that the Paleolithic artisans were motivated by the transformative nature of the subterranean, oxygen-depleted space; there they could communicate with nonhuman entities inhabiting the underworld. They were making the drawings not for the tribe to see, but for keeping and maintaining their relationships with the cosmos.

Moreover, they were doing so in a state of euphoria. To see in the dark, they lit torches, which diminished the oxygen in the deep reaches of the cave, putting them into altered states of consciousness due to hypoxia.

Who doesn’t love an altered state of consciousness? Leaving drunken elephants and inebriated bats out of it, among humans, hallucinogens have been cited for the ecstatic visions they may induce, and many a modern artist has recoiled from rehab for fear of starving the muse.

Curiosity might lead one to do that; just ask any spelunker. But then why paint beautiful pictures there? And then Kedar had her eureka moment: the insight that torch fire deep inside a poorly ventilated cave system would induce hypoxia, which in turn could produce hallucinations and other perceptual distortions without the need to resort to drugs.

That in turn was reminiscent of ritual intoxication practices among modern hunter-gatherers. Kedar also surmises that once the Paleolithic artists became aware of this effect, they entered the caves and induced the intoxication deliberately.

And so, simulating caves with narrow mouths and based on separate research verifying the simulations, the team demonstrated that when fire is used deep inside a narrow-mouthed cave or narrow cave corridor, the concentration of oxygen drops fast.

The people inside become oxygen-deprived, and this hypoxia induces an alternative state of consciousness. Hypoxia symptoms can range from hallucinations to out-of-body experiences, Kedar and Barkai write.

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