Original subtitles

And I'm losing track of where I end and here begins.

Dr. Edsel Cardenia is a clinical psychologist employed by the American

Department of Defense.

His research is into altered states of consciousness.

And Janet Crossley has a special talent for self -hypnosis.

Anything else you can tell me at this point?

Through Janet, Dr. Cardania is hoping to connect with the minds of our most

distant ancestors and enter their primitive world.

Coming back home after a long time away.

For over a hundred years, we have searched for traces of our earliest

to find out how our species emerged.

Were the cave dwellers of the distant past pre -human creatures or were they

all like us?

Hidden inside this French cave, 19th century archaeologists found a tiny

of a human -like head.

Called the Venus de Brassens -Puis, we now know that she is 25 ,000 years old.

But who were the creatures who made her?

Were they our species or something else?

When did people like us first appear on the Earth?

Today, archaeologists need to discover the first real humans before they can

understand our deepest origins.

A team from Bordeaux has come to explore a small area where the cave roof once

opened to the sky.

Searching through the filth, the archaeologists come across a hoard of

First, a flint fragment.

And then more.

Another flint, but with a sharpened edge, like a blade.

There's a fox's tooth.

and the bones of other animals abandoned on the cave floor just a few meters

from the place where the venus was found

at

their site office the archaeologist analyzed the large collection of animal

bones from the cave.

They hope that these bones will tell them something about what went on there.

Looking closely at them, they see minute cut marks, the telltale traces of de

-fleshing.

Flint tools were being used in the cave to get at the animal meat.

These bones are domestic rubbish.

The cave was perhaps the home to creatures intelligent enough to make

to use tools 25 ,000 years ago.

The bits of bone and the bits of stone that archaeologists excavate are not

important in and of themselves.

Archaeologists look at the relationship between these objects, look at the

patterns that we see in them, and then create some significance to these

And it's by looking at those patterns, looking at those relationships, that we

can start asking questions about the people who made them. Not only asking

questions about the people who made them, but also about ourselves in

relationship to these people. And we can start thinking about, were those people

like us in any way?

To the Garonne floodplain from Brassens -Puy are the foothills of Kersi.

And here our ancestors have left another kind of evidence that may help us

understand what kind of creatures they were.

Once again in caves, there are traces of their physical presence.

A footprint.

And something else.

Markings on the rock.

Drawings.

They're the same age as the bones the archaeologists have discovered.

It looks as if the painters drew the animals they saw around them.

Strangely, the archaeologists have found nothing to suggest that people ever

lived here.

And 200 metres from the entrance of the cave, there's something more.

a pair of horses covered with a halo of red and black dots

and adorned with the painter's handprints

but

there are no other remains

nothing at all it seems they came painted the horses and left

Sometimes it's very frustrating looking at these images.

It's like a story with illustrations.

We don't have that story from the ancient minds that made these paintings.

We have to think of some other way of trying to understand what that story is,

what it is that those ancient people were trying to portray in those images

they painted on the walls of the caves.

If we could make sense of these images, for the first time we might understand

how the minds of our ancestors worked, if they were at all like us.

But until now, the archaeologists have failed.

The meaning of the images remains a mystery.

On the other side of the world, Thomas Dawson and his colleague David Lewis

Williams believe they're on the verge of a breakthrough in understanding the

European cave paintings.

It's based on discoveries made high in the cliffs of the great South African

escarpment.

Here, too, there are pictures on the rock.

Paintings of antelopes cover the sandstone walls.

The connection between these and the French caves is something that has

people for many, many years.

Like the French caves, these are paintings, a lot of animals, beautifully

painted animals.

They are done one on top of the other in superpositions.

Sometimes they are... interacting, as it were, with the rock face.

More than half the rock paintings are of the eland antelope.

But the pictures are so complex that only by tracing them can the

know precisely what is there.

Further up the cliff, Faith, is an extraordinary painting of an eland

with some human figures.

Here the painter has captured an instant of time with uncanny accuracy, the

moment of the eland's death.

When an eland dies, it staggers on its front legs, its weight pushes down the

front legs, its head comes down, the neck comes down like this.

and its head swings uncontrollably like that as it loses control of its muscles.

And here you can see the eland is looking directly at us with its hollow

The artist's observations are precise.

Here the eland's legs are shown crossed in death.

But now the painter records a moment which is quite unreal.

One of the figures is holding on to the animal's tail.

His face is completely unhuman.

Like the eland, his legs are crossed.

He even has eland hooves.

It's almost as if the human figures in the painting are imitating the dying

eland.

Explorers reported that these pictures were the work of scattered groups of

hunter -gatherers who once lived in these mountains, the Bushmen.

Like the early European cave paintings, the pictures seem to describe a complex

world of stories and mythology.

But these were made only a few hundred years ago, almost within living memory.

The archaeologists believe that the stories behind these paintings could be

way into the lost world of the cave people 25 ,000 years ago.

I'm going to help you to go into an even deeper state of hypnosis.

And I'm going to help you by just counting slowly from 1 to 30.

0 represents being wide awake.

1 to 10 represents feeling slightly different than normal.

Dr. Cardenio's investigation into the human mind involves 28 specially

volunteers with a very rare talent.

Like Janet Crossley, all are gifted at self -hypnosis.

From 41 onwards, very deep hypnosis, open and that you can go as deep into

hypnosis as you want.

So very slowly now, it's one, two.

But this is an unusual kind of hypnosis.

Cardenia will be making no suggestions to Janet.

Instead, the aim is to shut down her awareness of the modern world around

leaving her mind free to function on its own.

Six. In hypnosis, you are in an enhanced form of suggestibility. So if you give

a suggestion, the person, at least a highly hypnotizable person, is likely to

experience it. So the question is, if you minimize the suggestions or

them, is there something that very highly hypnotizable people may

when they say that they are in a state of hypnosis?

After 20 minutes... Janet begins to have experiences which have nothing to do

with the real world.

She's in a state of altered consciousness.

There is a pulsating white light, but it's becoming more colorful.

Dr. Cardenia believes that this may be what he's looking for, mental events

which derive solely from the workings of the human mind, not from experiences of

the modern world.

State?

Forty.

Okay.

Psychic. tunnel of colors and it feels like I'm going up through a tunnel of

colors.

The mantis was the one who put Komanga's shoe in the water.

In an archive in Cape Town there's a collection of Bushman stories.

Then the mantis made an eland with Omonga's shoe.

It's a record of the ancient spoken language of the Bushmen.

The eland et, causing himself to grow with the mantis's

honey.

The stories are very obscure.

They emphasize eland, just like the painting.

But for Lewis Williams, the language of the stories offers a clue.

The language that the Bushmen spoke is now extinct.

Nobody speaks that language anymore, so this is the only record that we have of

it. But it's only one of a whole family of Bushmen languages, not just one

Bushmen language.

And other languages like Qong and Tui and Qong, those

languages are still being spoken far to the north in the Kalahari Desert.

Until recently, the Kalahari Desert was inhabited only by small bands of nomadic

hunters.

These are the Djukwantsi, people who still speak a bushman language.

They no longer live by hunting in the old way, but their beliefs are still

traditional.

We knew that they had never made paintings, but from the work that

anthropologists had carried out in the Kalahari, we knew that they were living

fairly traditional lifestyles.

The Dutuanthi live hundreds of miles from the Drakensberg rock shelter, but

Dauphin has brought tracings of the paintings to show them.

These are copies of pictures from the Drakensberg.

. .

.

. .

For the Jituansi, the island has sacred power, which people at Kunta can hear.

And what about this figure here?

The Pitwanchi dance at night to summon the Elan power.

The elan dance lasts for several hours.

As it continues, something strange happens to Kunta.

The noise and the rhythm begin to shut out reality and send him into a trance,

into a state of altered consciousness.

In their trance, dancers see the spirit of the elan as visions in the darkness.

and believe they take on its power.

Anthropologists call this kind of ritual shamanic.

Kunta is a shaman.

What we've been seeing here is a classic shamanistic trance ritual.

And this relates to very similar experiences that people have all over

world. And this is because the kinds of experiences that shamans have in an

altered state of consciousness are the same.

The way in which they talk about them is often very similar as well. People talk

about traveling underground, going through a tunnel, dying and coming alive

again. They talk about flying, a sense of weightlessness, floating above

everybody around them.

They also use animal spirit helpers in order to go on these journeys to the

spirit world.

The colors, what shape?

Do they have any shape?

They keep changing and mixing.

It's like they're flowing through each other and on top of each other.

Sometimes mixing and making new colors and sometimes not.

I feel like I'm going to be able to float up into the colors soon.

Like Kunta, Janet Crossley is also experiencing hallucinations.

Have you seen any shapes, forms, anything of that sort? Any other

Yes. Can you please tell me more about them?

trying to figure out if it was a fish or if it was something else, and I think

it was something else.

Once their awareness of the outside world was gone, all of Cardenius'

saw visions of some kind.

They would go into a place where they may see a number of unusual images,

surrealistic type of landscape, a vast sea of darkness, or they may see just

colors, bright colors, very rich, intense, vivid imagery.

For Lewis Williams and Dawson, the Drakensberg paintings depict just this

of imagery.

To them, the pictures record hallucinations seen by shamans in

The paintings are not just paintings of everyday life.

They depict the trance experience and the beliefs associated with it. But

are also a lot of hallucinatory elements that could only have been seen by

medicine men in trance in the spirit world.

ways of letting everybody know what those experiences were and helping to

belief in the spirit world possible for everybody in the community.

The South African archaeologist began to wonder if the French cave paintings

might also be evidence for belief in a spirit world 25 ,000 years ago.

In France, the cave at Pesmel has begun to reveal its secret.

Detailed work by the French archaeologists has identified the

the cave painters used to get their characteristic airbrushed effect.

The painters took the pigment in their mouths and spitting it in the wall and

using their hand as a stencil to realize the outline

and then feel the figure in the same way by spitting the pigment.

And the French archaeologists have noticed a strange thing about the

in Peshmel.

The animals are often painted right on top of one another, with no reference to

what was there before, just like the South African pictures.

There are a great many similarities between the paintings made in France and

those made in Southern Africa.

Looking at those similarities, you start thinking there must be something

similar about the processes that produced these images in the first

Dawson's sense of a connection between the French and South African cave

paintings is strengthened by an unusual drawing in Peshmerga.

It's hidden away at the end of a narrow passage.

It looks like a human being.

with painted lines coming out from its body, like arrows or spears.

Worn by time, the drawing has been called the Wounded Man.

Archaeologists have always found it puzzling.

The drawings of men, of human beings, are very rare, and usually it is in a

hidden place.

What does it mean? We don't know.

The meaning of the wounded man could be explained by the trance dance of the

Jutwansi.

It involves intense pain in the stomach and kidney.

. . . .

.

Kunta's pain seems to match the picture of the wounded man.

The archaeologists suspect that the drawing in the French caves is also a

shaman.

They're more spectacular.

Cardenio's study has produced some extraordinary results.

At a particular stage in the trance, all his volunteers see the same kind of

hallucination, strange visions of abstract geometric shapes.

They move and they flow into each other, and sometimes they mix and

sometimes they don't.

What I found was that across individuals, and again, please bear in

these people were not in contact with each other. They were not in the same

class. They did not know each other. I found out that there seemed to be more

less a general pattern.

When people are experiencing unusual altered states of consciousness, they

some geometric patterns.

There are about four or five constants.

A number of them have to do with grids, just geometric figures that have to do

with grids, spirals.

funnels, tunnels, figures of that sort.

Grid patterns are one of the most common forms of hallucination.

They even appear to patients with eye disease.

Edmund Gowler thieved these grids spontaneously in areas where his vision

blank.

Doctors believe it's because the brain is starved of information from damaged

parts of the retina.

just as it has starved of visual information in a trunk.

And then you have another series of straight lines like that, which have got

lines across them to give you a grid of patterns.

What we think is happening is that it's something to do with the way the brain

is wired up, something to do with the architecture of the visual brain.

And really, to develop that theme further, we have to look at the brain as

working. We have to capture a hallucination in a brain scanner.

see which parts of the brain are actually lighting up during a

These hallucinations can last up to five minutes.

The scanner captures a minute slice of the patient's brain each second.

The scientists are able to see which parts of the brain are active at any

moment.

This is a patient who's having grid hallucinations.

This is when there's no hallucinations taking place. He's lying in the scanner.

He's waiting for one to occur.

When one occurs, he presses a button, and these are the areas of the brain

light up when he's hallucinating.

We can see these little red dots here. They're in the back of the brain in the

occipital lobe. They're in an area that we would expect to light up when grids

were hallucinated.

These grid hallucinations aren't just caused by eye disease. They also occur

people with migraine, strokes, and other

conditions.

They are a universal product of the physical structure of the human brain.

No one's ever systematically looked at the exact geometry of these experiences.

So the surprising feature was that when patients drew them or described them in

more detail, they all turned out to be the same experience.

Deep in the prehistoric caves, the archaeologists have found more than just

animal paintings.

The cave people drew a lot of abstract images.

Some are geometric rows of colored dots.

And many of the others are grid patterns, very like the ones observed in

brain scanner.

No one has really studied these abstract markings until recently.

But now their significance is becoming clear.

Exactly the same kind of grids and dots appear in the Bushman paintings of their

trance experience.

Once we found out about the research on altered states of consciousness and the

way in which people see hallucinations, we saw those kinds of images in the rock

art of Southern Africa.

We then started comparing that with the images that we found in the French

caves. And one of the most striking comparisons we can make is this image

where you've got dots superimposed on an eland's body.

There's also a grid painted into the eland's body, very, very similar to this

horse that we find in Peshmel in the French caves, where the dots literally

cover the body and go beyond the body of the horses.

Now, for the first time, the scientists had hard evidence to suggest that trance

and hallucination were the key to the cave paintings.

In many of the French caves, the archaeologists have noticed a strange

relationship between the pictures and the rock itself.

What is fascinating is the way they use the rock.

Sometimes the whole body of the animal is contained in the shape of the rock.

It's just like they have been inspired by...

by the detail, the shape.

They just pass through and see, well, this is a mammoth, this is a horse.

We found this everywhere.

In looking at the Southern African rock art for a long time, we thought that

they were just painting images on the rocks.

We then started realising that they used specific natural features to enhance

the image in some way.

Some images come out of cracks in the rock. In this instance, it's not so much

crack as a line which they've drawn on the rock, and then they have a human

the knee, the calf, and a hoof at the end coming out of this line in the rock.

The archaeologists suspect that the rock face played the same role in the French

caves, that it's significant.

with spiritual.

Perhaps the spirit world lay beyond the rock face, and these paintings were a

way of bringing the spirit world and the real world together.

After years of studying the South African art, Dowson and Lewis Williams

believed that at Pashmeltu, the rock wall was a sacred place.

The rock face itself is important, and that is why we have handprints placed

onto the rock, not just to make pictures of hands, but more to it than that. And

the interesting thing is that here we've got handprints.

This lower one here, somebody would probably have had to lie down on the

to make it. And then there are two other prints up here, one here and one here.

And the important thing is the way in which these handprints were made,

when they placed the hand there and they blew the paint over the hand, the hand

was then behind the paint.

So people saw the black, and it's only when they took the hand away that you

the print. But the ritual of making it was that the hand goes behind the paint,

and hence the hand reaches through into the spirit world.

The rock, as it were, disappears.

The membrane's gone, and we've made contact with the spirit world.

For Lewis Williams, the paintings at Pethwell are dramatic evidence of

where shamans sought power through visions of the animal spirits behind the

rock.

I think they're looking for animals, both with their eyes and with their

So the vision comes, and then they paint the vision on the rock, but the rock

suggests the vision in a way, and they're seeking it.

So there's a constant interaction going on between the person and the rock,

which is a membrane between this world and the spirit world. So it's an

interaction of two realms.

Two, not quite yet, but you will be fully alert.

And one, you can open your eyes.

Fully alert.

How are you?

Fine. What can you tell me about your experience now, just general impression?

It's wonderful.

A feature of altered consciousness is the euphoria that many people experience

afterwards.

People talk about heaven and I think that's what it's like.

How real did the experience feel?

It was real.

Yeah, perfectly real.

Do you sense that this has any kind of aspects to it? Is it helpful

to you, perhaps to other people?

I know it's helpful to me.

As far as to other people, I don't know.

If other people could go there, then it would be good for them, too.

It's their way of healing people who are sick.

But whatever it does for their health, it makes them feel good.

The need to make sense of what the brain makes us feel is a universal quality.

It's a function of our modern human mind.

It's experienced and profited all over the world.

Even though these are very different cultures, geographically distant, what

we're having is not some kind of cultural diffusion.

What we're having is people who are talented at getting into their own

experience and being able to come back to us and report about those voyages,

that those people were in South Africa, they were in France.

and they were in a hypnosis lab in the U .S. and anywhere else.

I think this is a very important point because then it tells us there is

something essentially human about this experience.

We can see that these people were thinking about not just the world that

were living in, but also other spiritual worlds, other realities, not just the

physical reality of their day -to -day existence.

And not only that, but they were using graphic ways of portraying those

different realities.

We do that in our art today. We do it in our archaeology. We do it in all sorts

of different ways of thinking about other realities.

Maybe these people who made these paintings so long ago were very much

ourselves today.

When the early archaeologists first discovered the Venus of Brassens -Puy,

felt they were dealing with pre -human creatures.

They were wrong.

Today, we know that the people in this cave 25 ,000 years ago had minds

identical to our own.

From this moment on, we know that we were truly human.

In the next episode, we'll go back to the very start of the human story.