Originally published at: Prehistoric cave painters may have been hallucinating due to lack of oxygen | Boing Boing
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Tripping your ass off like “cave” style, man that sounds cool.
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Seems far fetched to me
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AKA “cave whippets”.
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“Oxygen deprivation high” is something long known to teenagers who bought bags of oregano and catnip from untrustworthy drug dealers.
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Tell us more about your research on hypoxia and creativity, sir.
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Fair enough, that was pretty arrogant of me.
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I’ll tell you why I don’t buy it. If it was that common to drive oxygen levels that low while painting, it would be fairly common to drive it even lower while trippin’ and die of hypoxia. So where are the bodies? Maybe some were extracted their clan. But wouldn’t some wander even deeper and die?
Or maybe folks who lived intimately with fire knew the signs of bad air and knew to get the hell out. Yeah, maybe while hallucinating, but seems less plausible.
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Looking at the map of where most of the paintings were done, it’s striking to me that many are at forks. Narrower passageways would also force other cave dwellers to slow down and actually look at your handiwork. Those seem like more Occam’s razorish explanations for the finding. But hey. Trip on. Don’t let me harsh your caveman buzz!
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I’m going to write the authors of that paper and tell them to hand in their resignations. You’ve made monkeys of them with this grand insight of yours.
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It took you just 30 seconds to outsmart those university eggheads.
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I agree. I’ll bet they had oxygen tanks with them,
Hmm… sounds a bit like the Oracle at Delphi… but artificially created rather than a natural phenomenon.
Must be sacred work if the gods and animals start talking to you while you’re doing it!
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An enclosed environment with oxygen levels driven down by combustion would presumably be pretty high CO2 (plus, one assumes, the usual cornucopia of mixed combustion products).
Given that humans have a robust detect-and-freak-out response to elevated CO2 levels (that they notably lack for merely running out of oxygen, as in nitrogen displacement incidents or carbon monoxide poisoning); I don’t doubt that the effect would put one in a slightly cognitively wobbly state; but I’d imagine that it’d be one of those harsh, scary(unless you are into that sort of thing; anyone found cave art that has a silhouette of a hand covering a mouth and nose; rather than just pressed up against the cave wall?), sort of mind-altering experiences; with the nagging feeling of incipient suffocation in a dark enclosed space; not the chill kind.
Is my understanding of relatively high CO2 environments incorrect on this point?
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They might be using hallucinogens but probably not Oxy deprivation because if they were, the drawing subject matter would be of every disconnected random thought instead of just big game animals. I think they went there looking for the spirits of animals that migrated away somewhere, maybe yearly or randomly. Recorded stories of migrant hunters (Planes Indians & Eskimos) said they all went under ground for the winter. That sounds sort of plausible during a time when fact checkers sometimes didn’t live to bring back the news, and how could they prove it anyway? (“what? they live in the woods 800 miles south? good story”)
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It’s $45 to read it for just 48 hours, but one issue that jumps out is the gloss of the study talks about torches.
At Lascaux, Altamira, and a number of other sites, artists are known to have used small oil lamps, which could use much less oxygen. Altamira was labelled as a fraud after 19th century explorations because there was so little soot from burning torches. Also, it was explored in the 1800s by lantern light before incandescent light was available, and if they weren’t tripping, the original artists almost certainly weren’t either.
If the authors are speaking narrowly in the actual study, they may have valid points. Examining the issues around breathing underground is definitely worthwhile. But if they are being overbroad, watch out.
Another potential issue is that this implies very risky behavior – travelling deep underground with little oxygen – when the evidence suggests many sites were visited over very long periods by people who clearly knew what they were doing. The evidence is hard to square with risky or stupid behavior.
The claim that navigation required artificial light is also questionable. Moving beyond what is known may have needed light, but retracing steps known from years of visits may not have taken much light at all. It is possible, at least at some sites, that most travelling was done in darkness and painting involved recreating something that had already been practiced outside, not an original work.
Like I said, this is definitely a topic worth examining. But I’d be very cautious about any conclusions.
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The best evidence at the major sites is they were visited by maný people over many years. They understood the risks and rules of the places they were visiting.
Is it possible they knew all this and then went forward with risky behavior where they were on the edge of low O2/high CO2/CO conditions? Yes, it is possible, since people definitely engage in risky behavior in ritualistic situations. But the odds are greater that people were not pushing their luck and found ways to mitigate their risks.
Odds aren’t certainty, for sure, so it’s good that these questions are being asked. But I’d be awfully cautious about accepting this claim.
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I can’t speak to the science of the findings themselves, but “maintaining connection to the cosmos” seems like an extremely modern sentiment to impose on pre-historic cave painters.
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altered states of consciousness
It feels like the baseline assumption here is that everyone has always had the consciousness of a person sitting in a fluorescent-lit office, and there needs to be an official medical accounting for any deviation. Whereas my feeling is. when you’re in a shifting bubble of firelight, navigating by touch through an organic maze of chthonic darkness, summoning images from the depths of your preliterate subconscious mind, then – regardless of oxygen – it’d be weird if you did have the mindset of a person watching Good Morning America.
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CC, please.
