The basic premise is that the shamans of these stone age cultures transported themselves into altered states of consciousness and then painted the results of their experiences experiences that frequently included the therianthropic beings they encountered. These works of art are manifest throughout the world over a vast prehistoric time period and demonstrate a universality of experience, from the entoptic images (dots, spirals and geometric patterns) frequently caused by psychotropic drugs, through to the imagery of time-lapse perception, often called tracers. It is convincing evidence that our prehistoric ancestors were dabbling with psychotropic plants and mushrooms in order to gain a state of consciousness that was fundamentally important to them. The cave paintings could be seen as the earliest folklore, told in pictures.