Graham Hancock on Psychedelics and the Dawn of Human Art
The oldest skeletons we have of anatomically modern humans come from Ethiopia and sit at roughly 195,000 years old, give or take a few thousand. Yet the bodies came long before the behavior. For most of that stretch, nothing much changed. Then somewhere under 100,000 years ago, and really within the last 40,000, something flips. It happens almost simultaneously across the whole planet, which is odd in itself. Suddenly our ancestors aren't only shaped like us. They act like us.
The clearest fingerprint of that change is symbolism, and above all the sudden explosion of art. People usually picture the painted caves of Europe, and those are part of it, but the phenomenon is not European. Indonesia has rock art just as old. The Americas are covered in it. Why human beings started making these images at that particular moment has been argued over for decades, and the art never arrives alone: the entire package of recognizably modern behavior shows up in the same window, as if someone threw a single switch.
What caught my attention was a body of research built by anthropologists and archaeologists over many years, led in large part by Professor David Lewis-Williams at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His group did something fairly simple in concept. They looked hard at what these cave paintings actually depict. And the patterns and figures that artists were putting on stone walls 30,000 or 40,000 years ago turn out to match, closely, what modern volunteers report when they are given strong psychedelics in laboratory settings and asked to describe what passes in front of their eyes.
That correspondence points somewhere unsettling. The biggest single leap in the story of human behavior may have been set off by our encounters with these substances. I owe a debt here to the late Terence McKenna and his book Food of the Gods, which raised the idea long before it was fashionable. But I try to keep my own thinking tied to research wherever I can, and it was Lewis-Williams's work, stretching back to the early 1970s, that pulled me down this road. Brick by brick he made the case that the painted caves were an art of visions. Shamanic art. The painters were shamans.
The link runs straight through to living practice. Among shamans working today in the Amazon or across the Kalahari, the heart of the whole tradition is a profoundly altered state of consciousness. Inside that state people undergo experiences they describe as beyond ordinary life, and it is those experiences that got recorded on the cave walls. Proving cause is hard, maybe impossible at this distance. The correlation, though, is plain enough: modern human behavior emerges right alongside evidence that our ancestors were deliberately seeking out visionary states, almost certainly with psychedelic plants.