Timeline-Prehistoric art

Psychedelics Influenced the Origins of Prehistoric Cave Paintings?

A new scientific paper on the origin of cave paintings suggests that humanity’s earliest artists deliberately sought out psychedelic states to create visionary art.

Prehistoric cave paintings across the continents have similar geometric patterns not because early humans were learning to draw like Paleolithic pre-schoolers, but because they were using psychedelics, and their brains—like ours—have a biological predisposition to “see” certain patterns, especially during consciousness altering states.

At its core, this proposed theory challenges the long-held notion that the earliest art and atrists were merely trying to draw the external world. Instead, it sees cave art as a deliberate mix of rituals inducing altered states for participants, coupled with brain chemistry that elicits certain visual patterns for humanity’s early chroniclers.

The cave painters had rituals that involved taking drugs (undoubtedly plants) that they consumed in a frenzy to get to this creative state. This behavior and the same results were noted by 1960s-era academics studying the effects of peyote, a hallucinogenic cactus found in North America
.

A BBC Documentary How Art Made the World suggested that art was originally an exclusive domain of spiritualists – these images were what the “Shaman” saw in trance. Terence Mckenna’s Stoned Ape Theory goes even deeper by suggesting that the ingestion of shrooms by early primates was the starting point of human evolution. But why would people across continents and cultures be drawn to record the same shapes?

But why would people across continents and cultures be drawn to record the same shapes?

The paper states the images generated by specific neural centers do resemble the templates for lots of 1960s psychedelic artists.