Sleep is older than our species. In one large survey of anthropologists’ reports, most societies also had shared customs built around altered states. But for the long stretch before writing, the evidence is thin, and most of it is chemistry. Pottery from Jiahu, China, holds traces of a fermented drink from as early as the seventh millennium BCE. Funeral fire bowls in the Pamir Mountains held burned cannabis around 500 BCE. Hair buried in a cave on Menorca, Spain, around 800 BCE carries plant compounds that act on the brain. These traces show what some people did. What they felt, believed, or hoped for is almost always [Unknown].
How to read the labels on this page: [Documented] means the evidence shows it directly. [Strongly supported] means strong sources agree. [Plausible] means the evidence allows it but doesn’t prove it. [Disputed] means qualified experts disagree. [Unknown] means the evidence can’t answer the question.
What is an “altered state,” anyway?
It’s a label researchers use for a change in how consciousness works. Definitions differ, including over whether a state must be temporary. A major 2005 review sorted these states by where they come from. Some happen on their own. Others are set off by physical or bodily triggers, by mental practices, or by illness (Vaitl et al. 2005). Substances are another route, as the cases below show. The phrase was already a research heading by 1966, when Archives of General Psychiatry ran an article by A. M. Ludwig titled “Altered states of consciousness” (Ludwig 1966).
Analogy: think of “altered state” as a drawer in a modern filing cabinet. Researchers find it handy. But the people in this chapter didn’t build that cabinet, and we can’t assume they would have sorted their own experiences into that drawer.
Did altered states exist before humans?
Sleep did. (Not every definition counts sleep as an “altered state,” but it’s a change in awareness we can trace far back in animal life.) In 2017, a team at the California Institute of Technology reported that the upside-down jellyfish Cassiopea, an animal with no central brain, passes three standard tests for a sleep-like state. It quiets down at night. It is slower to respond when disturbed during that quiet time. And when researchers kept it from resting, it was less active and less responsive the next day (Nath et al. 2017). [Documented for this species] The authors say this supports the idea that sleep appeared early in animal evolution, before central nervous systems. [Plausible]
What about something beyond sleep, like an animal version of a trance? We found no good evidence either way. [Unknown]
What does archaeology actually find?
Before writing, a mind-altering practice leaves a trace only if something physical survives. That could be a residue soaked into a pot, a charred plant in a fire bowl, or a chemical locked inside a strand of hair. Here’s where the lab work gets fun. Chemists pull molecules out of a tiny sample, sort them, and measure their mass. Then they compare each one with known reference compounds. The tools have names like gas chromatography and mass spectrometry.
Analogy: it’s like dumping a mixed bag of LEGO bricks, sorting them by size and shape, and matching each piece against a parts catalog.
Jiahu, Henan province, China (seventh millennium BCE). Researchers tested pottery pieces from 16 vessels found in household areas of this early farming village. The chemistry pointed to a mixed fermented drink made from rice, honey, and fruit: hawthorn, grape, or both (McGovern et al. 2004). [Documented, in one study] How strong the drink was, who drank it, and why are all [Unknown]. The authors say their findings help explain the earliest descriptions of fermented drinks in the Shang oracle inscriptions of about 1200–1046 BCE, which they call the earliest texts from China. Those texts were written more than 4,000 years after the Jiahu pots, so they can’t tell us what Jiahu villagers thought.
Es Càrritx cave, Menorca, Spain (about 800 BCE). People buried their dead in this cave for centuries. In a funeral rite carried out for only some of the dead, locks of hair were dyed or coated red, combed, cut, and sealed inside small containers made of wood or antler. A group of these objects was hidden in a small inner chamber that was sealed around 800 BCE. In 2023, a team from universities in Spain and Chile tested hair from one container. The reported calibrated date spans 820–551 BCE at two standard deviations, with a median of 779 BCE; the authors emphasize a narrower high-probability part of that range. The hair held ephedrine, atropine, and scopolamine (Guerra-Doce et al. 2023). [Documented] The most common explanation is that hair takes in what’s circulating in the blood as it grows. The authors say the strands’ length and tests along them point to use over nearly a year. [Plausible] The hair roots were missing, so they couldn’t tell one end of the strands from the other or pin down the timing more exactly.
The chemical findings do not identify a single plant species. The authors discuss several possible sources and purposes, but the hair itself cannot show exactly which plants were used, who handled them, or why. [Unknown]
Jirzankal Cemetery, eastern Pamir Mountains, Xinjiang, China (around 500 BCE). Researchers tested samples representing 10 wooden braziers (fire bowls) and 4 burned stones from the tombs. They found cannabinol, a compound that forms when THC breaks down, inside 9 of the 10 braziers and on 2 of the stones. (THC is cannabis’s main mind-altering compound.) As a check, they also tested the outside surfaces of the bowls and found none there (Ren et al. 2019). [Documented] The team concludes that people burned cannabis on hot stones during funerals, and that the plants were richer in mind-altering compounds than most wild cannabis. They picture funerals with fire, music, and smoke meant to guide people into an altered state. That picture is their interpretation. [Plausible] They leave open whether people grew the plants or gathered naturally stronger wild ones. [Unknown]
What about “trance” in cave and rock art? In the late 1990s, Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams set out an approach that relates cave wall paintings like those at Lascaux to shamanism. The French Ministry of Culture’s Lascaux site lists it as one interpretation among several (French Ministry of Culture). This is a modern interpretation, not direct evidence of the painters’ experiences, and it remains debated. [Disputed]
How we know
What evidence exists. For the time before writing: chemical traces in objects and bodies, dated by radiocarbon and by where they were found. Later written descriptions of living societies add a lot, with limits. In 1973, Erika Bourguignon reported a survey of the written ethnographic record for 488 societies worldwide. For 437 of them, or 90%, researchers had reported at least one “institutionalized, culturally patterned” form of altered state. The rate ran from 80% to 97% by region, and some societies had none on record (Bourguignon 1973, pp. 9–12). [Documented for that sample] So the answer is “most,” not “every.” Bourguignon’s own view was that the capacity is universal but what societies do with it is cultural. And her sample described recent societies, not prehistoric ones.
Mistakes get caught. Plant remains once reported as cannabis or ephedra at Gonur, Turkmenistan, and tied to debates about an ancient ritual drink, turned out on re-examination to be impressions of millet grains on pottery (Ren et al. 2019, Discussion). Some older reports of drugs in ancient bodies have been criticized for weak or poorly described methods (Guerra-Doce et al. 2023, Introduction). One study is a start, not a verdict.
Whose voices are missing. Everyone’s. No person in these cases left words about what they felt, and no firsthand account survives from before writing. Bourguignon’s survey counted what ethnographers wrote down, so it inherits their choices about what to notice and what to call a “trance.” Preservation decides too. Dry caves and desert tombs keep hair and wood. Most everyday practices left nothing behind.
A deliberate gap. Chemical traces of mind-altering plants have also been reported from pre-Hispanic objects in the Americas (Guerra-Doce et al. 2023, Introduction). This collection treats Indigenous plant knowledge and ceremony as belonging to the communities that hold them. This page leaves those cases out until those communities’ own accounts and permissions can lead. That is a known gap.
Then vs. now
Then. What people did: they brewed a mixed fermented drink (Jiahu), took in plant compounds for months (Menorca), and burned cannabis at funerals (the Pamirs). What they believed about any of it: [Unknown]. When writing arrives in later chapters, it changes what we can study. It doesn’t mark the start of people’s inner lives.
Now.
- Sleep and dreams. Laboratory recordings and reports made on awakening answer different questions. A full 2010 review distinguishes REM physiology from reported dream experience and compares competing explanations (Nir & Tononi 2010). [Documented as that review’s account] Neither kind of evidence recovers a prehistoric experience.
- Substances. Two of the compounds in the Menorca hair, atropine and scopolamine, are among the ones that make jimsonweed poisonous today. Jimsonweed poisoning can cause delirium, hallucinations, seizures, coma, and death (MedlinePlus). People using something long ago doesn’t show that it was safe.
- Meaning. Science can measure what changes in the brain and body. It can’t settle what an experience meant to the person having it. In 1902, the American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) argued that ordinary waking consciousness is “but one special type of consciousness.” Other forms lie beside it, he wrote, “parted from it by the filmiest of screens.” He based this partly on observations he made while under nitrous oxide. In the paragraph just before, he described drunkenness, taken as a whole, as “so degrading a poisoning.” He argued against closing the big question too early (James 1902, Lectures XVI–XVII), and he went back and forth on it himself (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
What popular stories get wrong
| You may read | What the evidence says |
|---|---|
| “Every culture has a practice for inducing altered states.” | Most societies in one large survey did: 437 of 488. Not all. [Documented for that sample] |
| “Altered states are a natural, healthy feature of the brain.” | Sleep is normal. Some plants people used in the past are poisons. No source here supports calling altered states “healthy.” |
| “Rock art proves prehistoric people used trance to heal.” | Trance readings are disputed, and no source shows healing or treatment. [Disputed] |
| “William James founded altered-states science in the 1890s.” | The argument about other forms of consciousness quoted on this page came in 1902, in The Varieties of Religious Experience. This page makes no “founder” claim. |
| “Yoga has been practiced unchanged for 5,000 years.” | No evidence supports “unchanged.” The oldest surviving systematic Sanskrit account of yoga from a Brahmanical perspective, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, was probably partly compiled and partly composed in the late fourth or early fifth century CE, according to the specialist Philipp Maas (Maas 2017, p. 66). [Documented as Maas’s reconstruction] |