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<\/p>\nThousands of years ago, artists documented their world on rock walls\u2014including, perhaps, ritual use of hallucinogens.
\nBy Blair Mastbaum JUNE 2, 2022<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Humans have made art for millennia in and around the unusual rock formations of Algeria’s Tassili n’Ajjer\u2014including, possibly, depictions of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
\nHumans have made art for millennia in and around the unusual rock formations of Algeria’s Tassili n’Ajjer\u2014including, possibly, depictions of hallucinogenic mushrooms. AKLI SALAH, CC BY-SA 3.0\/WIKIMEDIA
\nA Land Rover speeds across an almost lunar landscape, sending plumes of dust skyward in its wake. Knocking around in the back seat, Giorgio Samorini snaps photos of eerily eroded sandstone formations. The year is 1988 and the place is Tassili n\u2019Ajjer, in the Algerian Sahara. It is a remote region with a well-deserved reputation for mystery, particularly regarding some of the extensive prehistoric art found in natural rock shelters scattered around its cliffs of orange-red rock. \u201cWhen I first saw the paintings, I felt like my life had entered a new phase. I\u2019ve never been the same,\u201d recalls Samorini, an Italian ethnobotanist and independent researcher who studies psychoactive plants and fungi.<\/p>\n
Archaeologists have documented about 15,000 drawings and engravings in the Tassili n’Ajjer region, which is designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site and is one of the most important collections of cave art in the world. Over millennia, prehistoric artists painted or carved a menagerie of animals, wild and domesticated, as well as plants and people involved in hunting and other daily activities. But there are also depictions of something much stranger: the \u201cRound Heads,\u201d humanoid figures with oversized heads who appear to be flying. Dated from 9,500 to 7,000 BC, the images of levitating people, as well as masked \u201cshaman\u201d figures with large mushrooms sprouting from their bodies, may be the earliest depictions of the ritual use of psilocybin-producing, psychotropic mushrooms, according to Samorini.<\/p>\n
The art on the cave walls of Tassili n\u2019Ajjer, he notes, was created during a period when the Sahara was a temperate savannah. \u201cWe know that various species of Psilocybe grew in this area at this time,\u201d says Samorini. \u201cTo imagine that the people who created these artworks were not aware of them isn\u2019t realistic. They lived nomadically, with probable encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna of the area in order to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1956, intrigued by earlier, anecdotal stories about the paintings, French ethnographer Henri Lhote launched an expedition to Tassili. When he saw the paintings\u2014one image about 20 feet (6 meters) in height\u2014he named them jabbaren, Tuareg for \u201cthe giants.\u201d Lhote thought that the paintings might have been depictions of extraterrestrials, but he never connected the art to psychedelic mushrooms.<\/p>\n
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Mushrooms appear to sprout from the limbs of a masked “shaman” figure (left); one of the “giants.” COURTESY JITKA SOUKOPOVA (2)<\/p>\n
Other Tassili prehistoric art scholars have a more grounded view. University of Bristol archaeologist Jitka Soukopova specializes in the Round Heads cave painting era but is not involved in Samorini\u2019s research, or with the study of psychedelics in general. She declined to discuss Lhote\u2019s alien theory, and notes that images of what Samorini has interpreted as psychotropic mushrooms could be almost anything. \u201cThere\u2019s no way to prove him wrong or right,\u201d Soukopova says.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese people were more like us than they were different. Their paintings are artistic interpretations of their natural environment,\u201d she says of the Tassili artists. \u201cWe know these humans had access to psychotropic drugs, so they likely experimented with them just like we do. I am convinced that prehistoric people used natural hallucinogens, but there is very little evidence to prove it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The mushrooms depicted in the Tassili caves may be Psilocybe mairei Singer, a species common to the region, according to a 2012 paper in Acta Bot\u00e1nica Mexicana by the late psychotropic mushroom expert Gast\u00f3n Guzm\u00e1n, which compared prehistoric mushroom depictions in Mexico, Spain, and Algeria. Because the images at Tassili are weathered\u2014and there are an enormous number of mushrooms that look alike\u2014even Samorini says identifying the exact species is not possible, particularly because physical evidence of psychotropic mushrooms, such as residues or even trace DNA, has never been found in the caves.<\/p>\n
Depictions of mushrooms in rock art is not unique to Tassili n\u2019Ajjer. Imagery has been found in caves from Tanzania to Siberia, where figures sport large mushrooms as caps, says ethnomycologist Brian Akers. Akers has written extensively about psychotropic mushrooms throughout human history, including as coauthor of a 2011 paper, published in Economic Botany, on Spain\u2019s Selva Pascuala cave, where artists painted mushrooms as well as bulls and other animals. He sees his field\u2019s ongoing debate about what prehistoric mushroom art represents in a philosophical light.<\/p>\n
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Humans appear to be flying or levitating in some of the ancient cave art of Tassili n’Ajjer. COURTESY JITKA SOUKOPOVA<\/p>\n
\u201cA determined armchair theorist can simply refute any connection between rock art and psychedelic mushrooms,\u201d Akers says. \u201cYou can lead a horse to fungal pictographs, but you can\u2019t make it see them. In that same way, how can we be sure the bull is really a bull? Maybe in some essential sense, it\u2019s really an enigmatic figure onto which we unwittingly project a culturally arbitrary notion of \u2018bull,\u2019 like seeing shapes in clouds. Maybe everything is just a social construct.\u201d<\/p>\n
Akers adds: \u201cThe Samorini mushrooms look like fungi to me. We know that the majority of other plants and animals in hunter-gatherer cave art were hunted and\/or consumed by the culture in question, so we can assume the mushrooms were, too. Sure, these depictions in Algeria are more abstract, less realistically depicted than the ones in Spain, in my opinion, but why not allow the possibility they\u2019re fungi?\u201d<\/p>\n
Akers notes that, since many other aspects of cave art are interpreted as historical records\u2014from types of flora and fauna to hunting techniques\u2014fungi also likely had some meaning to prehistoric people around the world who included them in their art. \u201cThese are likely cultures in which the role of the psychedelic effects of mushrooms are deeply integrated, right at the center of the culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
Samorini agrees, adding, \u201cMushrooms are a low calorie food and many species are highly poisonous\u2014even deadly\u2014so it\u2019s unlikely that painters would have glorified them on cave walls unless they had another, more ritualistic purpose.\u201d<\/p>\n
Samorini\u2019s psychedelic mushroom theory hasn\u2019t gained much traction among researchers, but he is undeterred. In the decades since his Land Rover first sped across the Algerian desert, he has expanded his mission, compiling evidence of a range of mind-altering drugs ancient humans may have used.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have evidence of humans experimenting with all sorts of intoxicants for thousands of years,\u201d Samorini says. \u201cOur prehistory was probably a much more experimental time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Source : https:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/psychedelic-mushroom-algeria.amp<\/p>\n
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