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E-book Animals, Plants and Afterimages : The Art and Science of Representing Extinction
In hisremarkable study of the Upper Palaeolithic parietal art of Western Europe, The Mind in the Cave, David Lewis-Williams suggests that some imagery present in caves such as Chauvet and Lascaux was inspired by ex-periences of altered states of consciousness.1 Emergence from such altered states can be accompanied by the appearance of afterimages, mental pic-tures that hang suspended in the field of vision for a minute or more. These images gradually lessen in intensity and clarity, slowly blending with the background of the surrounding visual field before ultimately disappearing. Lewis-Williams suggests that through their drawings and paintings, pre-historic people sought to ‘fix’ such fleeting images, granting them a mea-sure of permanence. Many images in the caves are of animals, including bears, bison, deer, horses, ibex and mammoths.
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