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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Mysterious Geoglyphs in India Are Largest Ever Discovered
Researchers discovered the world’s largest geoglyphs in the Great Indian Desert. Will their findings reveal who made these giant, enigmatic designs, and why?
Geoglyphs are sprawling designs made by digging into the Earth or piling up stones to form what mostly appear as geometric lines, and more rarely, as humans and animals.
Usually only fully visible from above, they can be found all over the world with some dating back to prehistoric times, and others quite recent. The most famous to date are the Nazca lines in Peru. While there are various theories around their builders and function, none have been proven and continue to be widely debated.
Carlo Oetheimer is an independent researcher of geomorphology, the study of Earth’s landforms. While conducting a Google Earth survey of India, he and his son Yohann Oetheimer, made a fascinating discovery.
“I was traveling all over the desert, and suddenly I found lines in the desert similar to the Nazca lines. I was amazed, and I said, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ I found one place, then two places, then eight places almost. That was the way I found the Thar Desert Boha geoglyphs,” C. Oetheimer said.
“So, under Google Earth’s images, we could see a concentric spiral — concentric lines. We didn’t really know at that point what they were, but we had to go on the site, on the field, to understand them better,” Y. Oetheimer said.
When the researchers visited the desert site in India’s Rajasthan region, what they found astounded them.
“We brought a drone with us to be able to take aerial photos of the geoglyphs. With the drone images we could finally see the true form of the line, which is a spiral,” Y. Oetheimer said.
