Supernatural: meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind Graham Hancock Century, 710pp, £20 ISBN 1844136817

On 18 July this year, possessing or supplying psychedelic fungi became an offence equivalent to possessing or supplying crack cocaine. Justifying its decision to close a legal loophole that had allowed their sale in a fresh, undried state, the Home Office said that the ruling would "benefit people likely to be at risk from the dangerous effects of magic mushrooms": in other words, those with fragile mental health.

Leaving aside the dishonesty and manifold absurdities of this line of reasoning - you might as well ban bicycles in order to protect people who have poor balance - one wonders at a culture that not only vilifies naturally occurring hallucinogens, but actively legislates against them. The real reasons for these crackdowns are rarely spoken aloud, but I would suggest that the prevailing orthodoxy of needy, neurotic consumerism ("anything goes, so long as it's a purchase!") is not entirely comfortable with mind-expansion.

And yet, if the theory outlined in Graham Hancock's provocative new book is anywhere near correct, it is all highly paradoxical - a classic case, you might say, of biting the hand that feeds us. As gripping as any thriller, but with profound implications for the values and future development of humanity, Supernatural sets out to explore what has been termed "the question of questions in palaeoanthropology".

This concerns the so-called "symbolic revolution" - that is to say, the sudden appearance, between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, of what we would now describe as artistic endeavour. Having evolved no more than crude stone tools over the preceding two million years, the hominid line then progressed in a geological blink of an eye to biotechnology, quantum physics and the internet (as well as the truly great civilisations of the past few millennia). What was it that propelled our escape from this inveterate torpor, that catalysed the emergence of the imagining mind like a butterfly shedding its chrysalis?

The symbolic revolution reached its greatest expression in the sublime cave paintings of south-west Europe, and it is in these magical and deeply hidden spaces that Hancock begins his search. Along the way, he gives an excellent summary of the activities of prehistorians over the past century or so, which have largely consisted of farcical attempts to foist rational thought-categories on to something that springs from wholly different sources.

Progress has been made in the past two decades, however, through the pioneering work of the anthropologist David Lewis-Williams. Having researched not only rock-art sites all over the world but also the types of hallucinations found across cultures, Lewis-Williams made a startling proposal. What we see in the strange and numinous imagery of Upper Palaeolithic painting, he claimed, isn't a crude attempt at realism, but the visual record of journeys into altered states of consciousness.

Given that the art in question includes depictions of bird-, beast- and insect-headed men, not to mention phantom-like stags with wildly elaborate antlers and veritable hosts of geometric signs, it seems odd that this insight was so long coming. But academics are a cautious bunch, and even the relatively broad-minded Lewis-Williams baulks at the prospect of entering these archaic mental territories himself. Hancock is more adventurous, rightly pointing out that to dismiss drug-induced visions as somehow "illusory", as Lewis-Williams does, is nothing but a crude philosophic prejudice.

For all its bluster, modern science has no idea what hallucinations really are, or why the same archetypal images should present themselves to people in different epochs and from widely different cultural backgrounds. (The etymology of the word "hallucinate" implies no glib value judgement, because it derives from the Latin for "to wander in mind", which in turn derives from the Greek for "be uneasy, distraught": hence the suggestion of a perilous inner journey.)

All this might seem to have little relevance to contemporary life, but the issues are fundamental ones. Professor Lewis-Williams is in sum saying that the symbolic revolution - the beginning of everything we think of as civilisation - was set in motion by the deliberate and systematic use of hallucinogens. Going one step further, Hancock allows himself to speculate about whether such experiences, rather than being delusive, are actually methods of gaining access to some mysterious "information bank" or "teaching system". One possible candidate for the whereabouts of such a "teaching system" is our own DNA, the vast bulk of which is, in effect, uncharted territory.

Sounds far-fetched? Well, maybe. Yet the idea of DNA as some kind of alien database that pre-dates life on earth has the support of the late Francis Crick, the man who "discovered" the double helix after a self-administered dose of LSD. It may be too soon to close our accounts with psychedelics yet.

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