The Squatter Man Petroglyph and Auroral Sky Mythology

On the night of 23 April 2023, an all-sky camera at the Hanle observatory in Ladakh, India — at 33°N geographic latitude — recorded a red aurora. The emissions themselves lay near 54°N, at altitudes the preprint puts at about 700 to 950 kilometers, high enough to be seen from India even though the aurora never reached it [32]. Plasma physicist Anthony Peratt of Los Alamos National Laboratory built his case across two papers in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science — “Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity” (December 2003) and its Part II, “Directionality and Source” (August 2007, with McGovern and others) — that many Neolithic and Early Bronze Age petroglyphs worldwide are direct depictions of high-current Z-pinch auroral plasma instabilities [2] [4], sustained by Birkeland currents flowing into Earth’s atmosphere at magnitudes on the order of megaamperes [1].

Hanle observatory. Photo: Alin Dev / Wikimedia Commons. Hanle Observatory in Ladakh, India. This is world’s highest observatory for optical and infra-red astronomy. Source

HAGAR gamma-ray telescopes at the Indian Astronomical Observatory, Hanle, by night. Photo: Indiajoe / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Birkeland current schematic. Photo: David Stern / Wikimedia Commons. Schematic of en:Birkeland currents. Source

The Z-Pinch in the Laboratory

In September 2000, plasma physicist Anthony Peratt, then at Los Alamos National Laboratory and already an established authority on high-energy discharge instabilities, received a communication from comparative mythologist David Talbott pointing out apparent morphological similarities between laboratory plasma discharge patterns and ancient rock art [5]. Peratt, an American physicist with credentials spanning plasma physics, nuclear fusion, and plasma petroglyph research, took the observation seriously and turned his three decades of laboratory work on discharge instabilities toward rock art [5]. That work led in December 2003 to a peer-reviewed paper in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science (Vol. 31, No. 6, pp. 1192–1214) titled “Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity,” proposing that many Neolithic and Early Bronze Age petroglyphs worldwide are direct depictions of intense auroral plasma phenomena—specifically high-current Z-pinch instabilities observed in the sky by ancient peoples [2] [3]. A Part II follow-up paper appeared in August 2007 (Vol. 35, No. 4), focused on the directionality and source of the proposed auroras [4].

Los Alamos aerial view. Photo: Los Alamos National Laboratory / Wikimedia Commons. Aerial view of Los Alamos National Laboratory, “1995 aerial TA-3 south to north”. Source

Illustration: Plasma-filaments. Photo: The original uploader was Iantresman at English Wikipedia. / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Illustration: Anthony Peratt. Photo: David Highfield / Wikimedia Commons. Source

The Z-pinch itself is a well-established plasma confinement configuration: an axial electric current through the plasma generates an azimuthal magnetic field that compresses, or “pinches,” the column radially inward. Laboratory Z-pinches of this class have been run at megampere discharge currents, among them a 1.8-MA dense plasma focus photographed with a 56-rayed filament pattern [1]. The unstable formations Peratt cataloged across his multi-decade laboratory work became known informally as “Peratt Instabilities” because he was the first to systematically document them. The instabilities evolve through dozens of phases, which Peratt recorded over more than three decades of laboratory work. [5]

The Z Machine. Photo: ENERGY.GOV / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Illustration: The MAGLIF Concept. Photo: WikiHelper2134 / Wikimedia Commons. Source

The most often depicted petroglyph in Peratt’s collection is what he termed the “squatter man,” an hourglass-shaped anthropomorphic silhouette [1]. In petroglyphs of stacked toroids, Peratt counted a double row of nine dots and matched it to the nine toroids a plasma pinch typically produces [1]. Peratt compiled more than 25,000 rock art images to support these correspondences, with fieldwork concentrated in the American Southwest and Northwest combined with international data collection. [5]

The Great Gallery, a Barrier Canyon Style rock-art panel in Horseshoe Canyon, Canyonlands National Park, Utah. Photo: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Rock art at Kokopelli Cave, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona: hand prints, a snake and anthropomorphic figures. Photo: NPS photo / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Mantis petroglyph, Iran, Khomein County, Markazi Province. Photo: Kolnegari M, Naserifard M, Hazrati M, Shelomi M / Wikimedia Commons. Source

The petroglyphs he studied date approximately to between 10,000 and 2,000 BCE, corresponding to the Neolithic through Early Bronze Age transition. The methodological pillar holding the comparison together is scale invariance: plasma behavior can be scaled across many orders of magnitude, so centimeter- and meter-scale laboratory Z-pinches can replicate Earth-scale auroral configurations. [1]

Kink instability at Aldermaston. Photo: UK Atomic Energy Authority / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Through computer processing of petroglyph images from different world regions, the data were arranged into animation cells, allowing a 3D reconstruction of the proposed auroral form—essentially running the laboratory instability sequence in reverse from carved images alone. The hypothesis implies an ancient aurora requiring the solar wind to have been between one and two orders of magnitude greater than present values, to produce visible high-current Z-pinch auroras at the lower latitudes where petroglyphs are abundant. But the most important finding—and the unresolved question—is whether the morphological match between 84 documented petroglyph types and Z-pinch discharge phases reflects a shared external phenomenon witnessed and recorded globally, or whether the correspondence is something the human visual system produces readily from many sources. The image data Peratt assembled, the 84-morphology catalog, and the supercomputer simulations built on the Chandrasekhar–Fermi equations—the same equations used to reproduce galactic-scale plasma structures—constitute the formal case. Peratt argues that high-current Z-pinch columns pass through stacked-toroid, ladder, pipette and vortex phases whose shapes resemble recurring petroglyph types [1] [6]. Whether that resemblance reflects an observed sky event remains contested.

Squatter Men Across Continents

In December 2003, plasma physicist Anthony Peratt published a paper in the IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science claiming that recurring worldwide petroglyph patterns are “reproductions of plasma phenomena in space” rather than products of shamanistic vision or symbolic tradition. The comparison rested on more than 25,000 GPS-referenced rock-art images that Peratt gathered with a team of about 30 volunteers [5]. Peratt reported correspondences between specific recurring petroglyph morphologies and high-current Z-pinch auroras, including stacked toroids and the anthropomorphic “squatter man” [1] [5]. The August 2007 Part II paper, co-authored with van der Sluijs and others, added orientation and field-of-view data surveyed in 139 countries [4] [6].

The squatter man configuration, under Peratt’s hypothesis, is interpreted as arising when a disk or torus around a linear discharge column is bent by magnetic fields induced by intense current flow, producing an apparent hourglass form in which upper torus edges point up (forming “arms”) and lower torus edges point down (forming “legs”). Peratt documented this configuration in rock art of the American Southwest and Northwest and gathered further examples internationally. He extended the correspondences beyond portable rock art into monumental land-art features, claiming exact structural parallels between plasma discharge formations and stone circles including Stonehenge and the Majorville Medicine Wheel in Canada. Peratt’s claim adds a plasma-physics source to the stone circles. [5]

Sunrise over Stonehenge on the summer solstice, 21 June 2005. Photo: Andrew Dunn / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Source

Sarsen Stones at Stonehenge - geograph.org.uk - 1627241. Photo: Peter Trimming / Wikimedia Commons. Source

In Khomein County, Markazi Province, central Iran, a 14-cm motif was documented during 2017–2018 surveys at the Teymareh rock art site — which contains over 21,000 petroglyphs spread across 31 archaeological sites covering over 50 square kilometers, within a 150 square kilometer area[7][8]. The carving depicts a six-legged creature with a triangular head, large eyes, and raptorial forearms whose middle limbs end in loops or circles. In March 2020, entomologists and archaeologists Kolnegari, Naserifard, Hazrati, and Shelomi published a peer-reviewed identification of this motif in the Journal of Orthoptera Research as a prehistoric praying mantis, probably a local species of Empusa, combined with the widespread “squatter man” motif[9][26]. The paper notes that some archaeologists associate the squatter man motif with aurora caused by plasma discharge, a Z-pinch instability, and it does not dispute that reading[26]. The press release on the paper adds that the circles flanking the squatter man figure may “represent auroras caused by atmospheric plasma discharges”[29]. Rock-art experts Jan Brouwer and Gus van Veen estimated the Teymareh carvings at 40,000 to 4,000 years old[7]; sanctions on Iran prevent the use of the radioactive materials that radiocarbon dating needs[29]. That dating uncertainty — a 10x range — sits at the center of any plasma-event claim. [7] [8] [9]

A living Empusa fasciata mantis. Photo: Alastair Rae from London, United Kingdom / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Source

Across continents, other rock-art traditions invoke sky beings in ways Peratt’s framework reads as supportive. The Wandjina figures of Australia’s north-west Kimberley, whose broad-stroke style dates to around 3,800–4,000 years ago, belong to the shared culture of the Worrorra, Wunambal and Ngarinyin peoples; they are usually painted with eyes and nose but no mouth, and the lines around their heads depict lightning coming out of transparent helmets [20]. A popular video says Aboriginal traditions describe them as “powerful sky beings who descended from the heavens in ancient times” and likens their headgear to space helmets [10]. The Nebra Sky Disc, dated by archaeologists to c. 1800–1600 BC and included by UNESCO in its Memory of the World International Register in 2013, carries an arc at the bottom that is usually interpreted as a solar boat with numerous oars, although some authors have suggested a rainbow, the Aurora Borealis, a comet, or a sickle [33]. In popular retellings of auroral folklore, the Northern Lights recur as warriors, bridges and torches: the Vikings saw in them the reflections of the Valkyries’ armor, other stories a glowing Bifröst bridge leading fallen warriors to Valhalla, and Native American and Inuit stories spirits carrying torches [13] [16]. These traditions place certain rock art and sky phenomena in the sky, but they do not adjudicate whether the sky events were auroral, plasma-discharge, or simply the Northern Lights visible at high latitude.

Illustration: Aurora borealis above Lyngenfjorden, 2012 March. Photo: Ximonic (Simo Räsänen) / Wikimedia Commons. Northern lights (Aurora borealis) flowing over the Lyngen fjord in 2012 March. Source

Aurora borealis above Storfjorden and the Lyngen Alps in moonlight, 2012 March. Photo: Ximonic (Simo Räsänen) / Wikimedia Commons. Source

Nebra Sky Disc, State Museum of Prehistory, Halle. Photo: Shonagon / Wikimedia Commons (CC0). Source

Wandjina at mt elizabeth. Photo: Robyn Jay / Wikimedia Commons. Rock painting of Wandjina from Mount Elizabeth, Australia. Source

Wandjina rock art. Photo: Claire Taylor from Everywhere, Australia / Wikimedia Commons. Source

The Lights as Living Beings

Popular retellings link the aurora to Bifröst and to the Valkyries’ armor [12] [13] [14]. The encyclopaedic account of Bifröst describes a burning bridge between Midgard and Asgard and does not mention the aurora [11]. In these retellings, the two interpretations — sky-bridge and celestial escort — anchor a wider pattern in which the aurora was treated not as weather but as inhabited space, populated by named beings whose behavior mattered to those below.

Aurora borealis at Bossekop, 21 January 1839: an engraving from “Under the Rays of the Aurora Borealis: in the land of the Lapps and Kvæns”, edited by C. Siewers. Source: Europeana. Source

Sámi and Norse peoples interpreted the aurora as the spirits or breath of the dead, with strong cautionary taboos (no whistling, singing, or teasing) that could provoke the spirits. Finnish and Sámi legend attributes the aurora to a ‘fire fox’ (revontulet) whose tail brushes the mountains and sparks the sky, paralleling how the Sámi viewed the aurora as ancestors and other Arctic peoples viewed it as animal or human spirits. The prohibitions reflected a recognition that the lights were responsive presences, not passive display. [13] [15] [16] [14]

Multiple Inuit and Eskimo traditions interpret the aurora as spirits of the dead playing ball with a walrus head; among some Greenlanders the players are the spirits of stillborn or murdered children playing ball with their afterbirths, and a regime of taboos governs human response. The phenomenon was simultaneously afterlife, recreation, and threat, and the rule across variants was the same: the lights were responsive presences, not passive display. [17]

Aurora over Kautokeino: a drawing made after a failed photograph by Sophus Tromholt, from “Billeder fra Lappernes Land”. Source: Europeana. Source

Wandjina rock art of the Kimberley in Western Australia depicts anthropomorphic sky-beings whose features are interpreted within Aboriginal tradition as cloud, lightning, and rain imagery, with the paintings coexisting alongside much older Gwion Gwion figures. Wandjina heads are framed by lines or blocks of color that depict lightning coming out of “transparent helmets” [20] [21]. In Aboriginal tradition the Wandjina are cloud and rain spirits who came from the sky or the sea and may be painted moving across the sky in a cloud or storm [18] [19] [20].

Auroral-style ‘luminous sky’ phenomena are embedded in stratified European folk traditions ranging from the Sámi and Norse in the north, to the Scottish ‘Merry Dancers’ — interpreted as a celestial battle with blood-red lights as omens of bloodshed — and southward to Estonian legends of celestial sleighs. In Greco-Roman mythology, Aurora is the personification of the dawn, and the sister of the sun and the moon. [13] Across these geographically distant cultures the auroral phenomena inspired a rich, convergent set of myths — the Norse identification with the Valkyries’ armor or the Bifröst bridge, the Sámi fire-fox legend, the Inuit view of the aurora as spirits playing a ball game with a walrus skull — in which the aurora was alive and one was expected to respond accordingly. [13] [22]

When the Sky Came Alive

In 774 CE, tree rings across Japan, Germany, Russia, the United States, Finland, and New Zealand recorded a simultaneous 1.2 percent spike in atmospheric carbon-14 — roughly twenty times normal year-to-year variation. This is the 774–775 Miyake event, and it is not the only one. Other extreme solar proton events of the same kind (Miyake events) are known, including 993–994 CE and c. 660 BCE in the Holocene, and one at 12,350–12,349 BC in the Late Pleistocene, the strongest found so far [23]. The 664–663 BCE event, constrained by larch tree-ring measurements from Yamal and Altai, shows a 12‰ rise in Δ14C over just two years, with a 14C production rate 3.2 to 4.8 times average solar modulation. These events were real, global, and produced atmospheric disturbances on a scale that could translate, in the right magnetospheric conditions, into low-latitude auroras visible from regions where such displays do not occur today. [23] [27]

But the geophysical condition Peratt’s hypothesis most heavily leans on is the Laschamps excursion of 41,000 to 42,000 years ago. The reconstructions agree that the geomagnetic field collapsed: it fell to about 10 percent of present strength at the nadir in the reconstruction of [24], and as low as about 5 percent in estimates reported by [30]. During this collapse, the magnetosphere compressed to approximately 2 to 5.3 Earth radii on the dayside, and magnetospheric modeling by Mukhopadhyay et al. shows the auroral oval detached from the poles and drifted toward near-equatorial latitudes — what they term an “omni-aurora” or “global aurora”. The sharpest weakening and tilting of the dipole spanned about 300 years within an excursion of roughly 2,000 years [24]. Cosmogenic isotope reconstructions put average beryllium-10 production at twice the present rate, confirming elevated radiation during the event. The dating aligns with the emergence of figurative cave art, and Cooper, Turney and colleagues proposed in 2021 that this excursion drove the rise of ochre use, cave occupation, and possibly Neanderthal extinction. Within nine months, two Technical Comments in Science challenged the chronology — Picin and colleagues argued that Neanderthal disappearance and most of the cited megafaunal extinctions were already under way thousands of years before the magnetic minimum. The geophysics of the Laschamps excursion is well-documented; its cultural consequences remain contested. [24] [30]

A sighting from low latitude does not require a Laschamps-scale catastrophe, though. During the moderate 23–24 April 2023 geomagnetic storm, an all-sky camera at Hanle, Ladakh, India (33°N geographic) recorded a red aurora. The aurora itself stayed beyond 50°N: low-energy electrons precipitating near 54°N made red emissions so high, several hundred kilometers up, that they were visible above the horizon from 33°N [32]. Today’s displays can therefore be seen from far lower latitudes than the ones where they occur, but the study does not show an aurora at the latitudes Peratt’s hypothesis requires.

Plasma-oxidation AMS dating can now date painted rock art (pictographs) to a span of several centuries: Shumla’s work on Pecos River Style anthropomorphs in Eagle Cave, Texas yielded three statistically overlapping paint dates clustering around 3280 BP [25]. Engraved petroglyphs are not datable this way, and no method yet ties a motif to a single auroral event. The smoking gun of an omni-aurora-era petroglyph layer dated to between 41,000 and 42,000 years BP would be the strongest available evidence; the strongest available counter-evidence would be a petroglyph cluster dated firmly to a geomagnetically quiet millennium with no corresponding plasma-aurora signature. The unresolved question is not whether the sky ever came alive — but whether the record survives well enough, on enough dated rock, to prove that someone was watching.

Connecting the Dots

Across cultures separated by oceans and millennia, the aurora is personified again and again in the popular retellings cited here. Norse legends, as retold, identify the lights with Bifröst, the glowing bridge that led fallen warriors to Valhalla, and with the breath of brave soldiers who died in combat [13] [14]. The Sámi saw the aurora as the souls of the dead or the spirits of ancestors, with prohibitions against whistling, singing, or teasing the lights, lest the spirits respond [13] [14]. Inuit communities described the aurora as dead spirits playing ball with a walrus skull [16]. The Finnish and Sámi “fire fox” legend attributes the aurora to a creature whose tail brushes mountains and sparks the sky [13] [14]. One could argue that this personification fits Peratt’s plasma-instability hypothesis: because high-current Z-pinch plasma forms and reforms dynamically, observers might have experienced auroral displays as encounters with a living being rather than passive celestial light. That argument is this paper’s speculation; the cited sources only list the myths. Under a mundane reading, the cross-cultural consistency of these myths reflects a common human tendency to personify powerful natural phenomena, and nothing cited shows that the shared taboos point to a shared experiential trigger.

Two competing interpretive frameworks now dominate academic debate, and they reach opposite conclusions from similar datasets. Lewis-Williams and Dowson’s 1988 neuropsychological model proposed that universal entoptic imagery experienced during altered states of consciousness produces the geometric and anthropomorphic petroglyphs found globally. Peratt classified some 84 petroglyph morphologies against laboratory Z-pinch data, with orientation and field-of-view data contributed from 139 countries [4]. His figures pair laboratory pinches of 1.3 to 16 MA with petroglyph shapes [1]. A 2020 study in the Journal of Orthoptera Research described a 14-cm Teymareh (Iran) motif as a six-legged creature with raptorial forelegs, probably an Empusa mantis, and saw the motif as a combination of a mantis and the squatter-man form [26]. Datura quids at Pinwheel Cave confirm that hallucinogens were used at one rock-art site, though the authors question the trance-imagery reading [28] [31]. The interpretive stalemate persists because neither framework has been definitively falsified, and the same image can be read as either entoptic projection or plasma record depending on the assumptions one starts with.

A precise chronological scaffolding for testing these hypotheses now exists, but it does not yet resolve the dispute. Tree-ring radiocarbon records have documented Miyake events with extreme precision: the ca. 660 BCE event is now constrained to 664–663 BCE based on larch tree-ring analysis from Yamal and Altai, showing a ~12‰ rise in Δ14C over two years and a 14C production rate 3.2–4.8 times higher than average solar modulation. The 774–775 CE event alone produced an ~1.2% increase in atmospheric 14C, roughly 20 times normal year-to-year variation, and is recorded globally in tree rings from Japan, Germany, Russia, the United States, Finland, and New Zealand. Peratt dates the petroglyph corpus he compares to roughly 10,000–2,000 BCE, the Neolithic to Early Bronze Age [1] [2], a range asserted rather than directly dated. Shumla dated paint layers of Pecos River Style figures in Eagle Cave (Texas) by plasma oxidation and AMS, bracketed by the oxalate crusts above and below, and the three paint dates overlap at around 3280 BP [25]. The technique name — plasma oxidation — echoes the language of Peratt’s plasma research program, yet those dates (about 1300 BCE) are younger than the range Peratt assigns to his corpus, and they date paintings in Texas rather than any motif of that corpus. This does not disprove either framework, but it exposes a critical gap: the plasma-oxidation method applies to painted rock art and gives spans of centuries [25], leaving the question of when, and whether, ancient peoples actually witnessed the instabilities Peratt describes, empirically open. [23] [27]

The Other Side

The dominant alternative in rock-art studies is the neuropsychological model developed by David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson in 1988, which explains the worldwide recurrence of geometric motifs through six universal “form constants” — grids, parallel lines, dots, zigzags, catenary curves, and filigrees — that arise as entoptic phenomena during altered states of consciousness. This framework was published in Current Anthropology and has been refined and debated over decades. At Pinwheel Cave, California, roughly 400-year-old Datura wrightii quids found on the same ceiling as the rock art confirm that hallucinogens were taken at a rock-art site; the authors read the painting as the Datura flower itself, and they say the find calls earlier assumptions about trance and rock-art imagery into question [28] [31].

The methodological scaffolding of Peratt’s comparative work has drawn pointed criticism. Pareidolia — the cognitive tendency to perceive meaningful patterns in ambiguous stimuli — combined with confirmation bias undermines any protocol in which researchers visually match plasma-discharge photographs against a curated bank of 25,000 petroglyphs without documented blind-testing, inter-rater reliability, pre-registered matching criteria, or statistical control against selection effects. The clearest illustration of why similar morphologies support competing readings is a 14-cm motif found at Teymareh in a 2017–2018 survey, which Kolnegari and colleagues, writing in the Journal of Orthoptera Research in 2020, read as a praying mantis, probably a local species of Empusa, combined with the squatter-man form Peratt (2003) had described from other regions[26][29].

The most exposed quantitative objections come from plasma physics itself. Birkeland currents linking the magnetosphere to the ionosphere are measured in megamperes [1]. The scaling premise that laboratory Z-pinch experiments can replicate Earth-sized plasma configurations is drawn from a web page reproducing Peratt’s own laboratory figure captions rather than from a primary plasma-physics derivation [1]. A further natural-experiment control weakens the assumed causal link between geomagnetic weakening and bursts of cultural activity: the Blake geomagnetic excursion about 125,000 years ago, a dipole weakening of comparable or even longer duration than the Laschamps event, left no detectable global extinction pulse and no documented cultural transition [30]. Granito and colleagues, writing in 2022, offered a complementary sociological perspective, finding that motifs from contact Aboriginal groups were more likely to be judged as intersubjectively recognizable than motifs from isolated groups, which they read as consistent with the idea that intergroup contact is likely to be an important factor in the cultural evolution of pictorial representation [34].

What We Actually Know

The international recurrence of similar humanoid and geometric rock-art motifs across continents is a genuine, non-trivial empirical pattern that every reviewing angle in this investigation acknowledges, even as they disagree entirely about its cause. At the foundation of the hypothesis sits Anthony Peratt’s body of work at Los Alamos, published across two principal papers in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science (December 2003, with a co-authored McGovern Part II in August 2007), proposing that many Neolithic and Early Bronze Age petroglyphs are direct depictions of high-current Z-pinch auroral plasma instabilities[2]. The supporting physical backdrop is well established: Birkeland currents flow into and out of Earth’s atmosphere at high latitudes with total magnitudes on the order of millions of amperes as routinely measured by today’s satellites [1], and popular accounts of auroral traditions describe these lights as spirits, death, and celestial battle across Norse, Sámi, Inuit, and Scottish ‘Merry Dancers’ lore [13] [14] [17]. The April 2023 observation from Hanle, Ladakh at 33°N showed that red emissions at anomalously high altitudes, produced by low-energy electron precipitation near 54°N, can be seen from low latitudes even when the aurora itself does not reach them [32]. Precisely dated Miyake extreme solar proton events (664–663 BCE, 774–775 CE, 993–994 CE) plus the 12,350–12,349 BC event provide directly datable, global physical records of extreme space-weather episodes against which any petroglyph chronology could be checked [23] [27].

The morphologically specific claims for the hypothesis are plausible but not yet established. Peratt’s mechanism identifies the ‘squatter man’ as a disk or donut-like torus around a linear discharge column bent by magnetic fields induced by intense current flow, producing the hourglass-like anthropomorphic silhouette, drawn from a database of several tens of thousands of digital petroglyph photographs roughly dated 10,000–2,000 BCE [1]. A 14-cm motif at Teymareh, Iran has been identified in the Journal of Orthoptera Research as a six-legged creature with raptorial forelegs, probably a local species of Empusa, combined with the squatter-man form [26]; the press release on that study notes that the circles flanking the squatter man figure in general may represent auroras caused by atmospheric plasma discharges [29]. Three principal competing explanations now stand on comparable evidentiary footing: direct depictions of intense auroral/plasma phenomena invoking the scaling principle that ‘plasma behaviour can be scaled across many orders of magnitude, we can use small scale models to replicate earth sized effects’ [1]; entoptic/neuropsychological phenomena during altered states of consciousness, with archaeologically confirmed entheogen use at rock-art sites including Pinwheel Cave[28][31]; and independent cultural convergence with shamanic projection as the mainstream position. Direct AMS radiocarbon dating of rock-art paint layers, bracketed by the oxalate crusts above and below, has been carried out by plasma oxidation at Eagle Cave, Texas, yielding paint dates clustering around 3280 BP [25].

The load-bearing premises of the hypothesis remain speculative. The quantitative physics objection is that the Birkeland currents involved are measured at megaampere scale today [1]. A fundamental timescale mismatch exists between laboratory Z-pinch structures, which evolve over nanoseconds to microseconds (the figures in [1] show phases at 6.5 and 9.5 µs), and human viewing and carving timescales of minutes to hours, a gap of roughly seven orders of magnitude or more that no available source resolves. The scaling premise that licenses direct visual comparison between laboratory shadowgrams and petroglyphs is sourced only to a single non-peer-reviewed compilation and is not independently demonstrated in primary plasma-physics literature. The extension from petroglyphs to worldwide creation myths, claiming structural elements such as first light/sound, separation of sky and earth, and the sacred mountain/tree preserve ancient recollections of intense plasma phenomena, competes with Proto-Indo-European linguistic reconstruction and the entoptic three-stage progression and is sourced only to proponent material. The Cooper et al. (2021) causal cascade linking the Laschamps excursion to Neanderthal extinction and the eruption of figurative cave art is contested by a Technical Comment in Science, and Peratt’s extension to megalithic monuments including Stonehenge and the Majorville Medicine Wheel is not independently substantiated in any peer-reviewed source. [1] [30]

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