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Now, an ambitious new idea began to take hold in Lewis Williams' mind because he was aware that there were other rock paintings which were very similar to those painted by the San. These were many thousands of years older, the earliest pictures ever created. And they were in Europe.
For many years I've also been interested in the cave paintings in France and Spain, the upper Paleolithic paintings. And one of the things that is really striking is the similarity between the rock paintings in Europe and the Southern African rock art.
Just like the San's obsession with the eland, prehistoric cave artists had also been captivated by a few key animals. And as with the images in South Africa, European paintings seem to graft features of animals onto the human body to create strange new creatures. But above all, there was one inexplicable feature shared by both San and European paintings which intrigued Lewis Williams.
What we've got here is a tracing of a painting made by the San Bushmen, probably about 200 years ago. It shows a picture of an eland with some San figures surrounding the animal, but there is also something else. The artist has scattered dots across the whole image. Ring any bells? Well, just take a look at this. It's a drawing of those two horses that we saw down in the caves in Pech Merel. And that too has got this strange patterning of spots all over it.
Just 200 years ago on rock walls in Africa, the San were creating the same abstract patterns as those painted tens of thousands of years ago in the caves in Europe. But why? What made people from completely different parts of the world and thousands of years apart come up with such strikingly similar geometric patterns? Lewis Williams began to wonder if the answer lay not so much in the art as in the brains of the people who generated it.
Now, in Southern Africa we knew that the art came out of trance experience, altered states of consciousness. So, it's a simple matter then, of course, to turn to people who have studied altered states of consciousness in laboratory work and ask them what happens to the brain when, when people go into an altered state. And it was then that we learnt that when people're going into an altered state, the first thing they see is zigzag lines, bright flashing zigzag lines as in a migraine headache, for example. And , or clouds of dots or grids, and they see these things because they are wired into the human brain.
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words to remember:
1.upper paleolithic: 上古时期
2.migraine headache: 偏头痛
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