Ancient cave painters may have been stoned, study says - Raw Story

Many ancient cave paintings, which mark the first known examples of artwork by hominids, are so deep under the ground that it would have taken extraordinary effort to view them.

So, if you're an ancient artist, what might inspire you to paint scenes of life — things like horses, kangaroos, and a warty pig in the case of the oldest-known cave painting — that few, if any, people would ever see?

Long story short, the artists were tripping — literally.

Gil Kedar, one of the paper's co-authors, told Haaretz that it first occurred to her that the cave painters may have been high because she was visiting rock-art sites in Europe and kept thinking about how difficult it was to get to them.

Likewise, this is not the first occasion in which scholars have speculated ancient cave painters may have less than sober.

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