Natural stone – a silent and implacable witness of our evolution

Fungoid Rock Art – Psychedelic fungi carved in stone

Due to natural stone, as prehistoric medium, we were able to find out the stories of our ancestors, written on stone walls and preserved over the millennia. Besides faith, stone also offers us an identity, by providing meaning to our becoming. Without our daily stone we become nothing, as the Romanian philosopher, journalist and economist Petre Tutea once said, "In the absence of faith, human becomes a rational animal that comes from nowhere and goes to nowhere". But what we would have done without stone?

1. Tasili N'Ajjer – A prehistoric museum in sandstone

In the wilderness of the old Mountains from North Africa, Berbers have a museum from their prehistoric generations, inhabitants of Savanas before Sahara. With "elements" aged 12,000, the museum offers more than 15,000 paintings and engravings in sandstone as well as surprising forms of stone, due to erosion and other known animals in the area. Sandstone, a rough, durable and porous stone, known as "water warehouse", allowed a more abundant vegetation compared to the neighboring desert areas, but, particularly, facilitated the development of an art form with surprising name: "fungoid rock art". This is the title chosen to define a large number of cavern paintings in which characters seem to hold in their right hand an object similar to a fungus, from which two parallel lines emerge to the head of the painted person. This form of art dominates hundreds of caves, spreading over hundred square kilometers and subjected to intense erosion.

2. Legend of a famous shaman

A long time ago and according to local legends, local Berber tribes used to gather around a shaman, famous for being able to invoke elder spirits and ask for support. He ingested a magic fungus as catalyst, which enable for him the gates of a new fantasy world, a realm of old spirits, which would convey positive energy for their living relatives. Shaman’s death has brought a lot of pain to those tribes and misfortune occurred to Berbers. A few generations had to pass since old man's death, until one day when his body has been dug up, dressed in his funeral robes. It was only back then when people, gathered for invoking shaman’s spirit, noticed the amazing pile of mushrooms developed over his clothes, mushrooms identical to the ones used in the past for summoning the ancient spirits. Legend has it that since that day luck has returned for Berbers and they started to chew the fungus, just as their shaman did once.  

Long after these events, it was finally successfully identified the fungus as Psilocybin Mushroom, a hallucinogenic known for its psychedelic effects. The caves were also identified by Henri Lhote, a French explorer who discovered the Tassili caverns, as sacred Sanctuary. Further theories consider that parallel lines between the fungus-shaped object and character’s heads from Tassili cave paintings could be interpreted as the hallucinogenic fluid and its effect on the human mind.

Trapped by the metallic oxides responsible for filtering its colors from black to pale red, Tassili sandstone remains an implacable witness of passing eras, to advance further on, just like it was once upon a time revealing to Berbers, like an eternal paper sheet.

What would we have done without stone?