After 40 days isolated in a dark cave in France, 15 researchers and volunteers finally saw a light at the end of the tunnel.
Emerging Saturday to cheers from onlookers, the team had bright smiles and special glasses to keep their eyes safe after being in the dark for so long.
“This experiment is a world first,” Professor Etienne Koechlin of the Ecole Normale Superieure said, according to French media.
“It was like pressing pause,” one of the team members, Marina Lancon, 33, told reporters, after she and six other women and eight men stepped out of the Lombrives Cave in the Pyrenees Mountains, on the border of Spain.
The $1.5-million experiment by the Human Adaptation Institute’s Deep Time Project was an effort to study how people react to extreme changes in living or environmental conditions.
Members of the French team that participated in the “Deep Time” study, celebrate as they emerge from the Lombrives Cave after 40 days underground in Ussat les Bains, France on April 24, 2021. APThe group had no clocks, no light and no contact with the outside world. Project director Christian Clot was able to issue audio podcasts from the cave, updating followers in French on their progress and findings.
The cave was cool and damp, a constant 54 degrees Fahrenheit and 95 percent humidity. The team members used a pedal boat system to draw water up from a natural well 150-feet deep.
With no natural or manmade way to gauge time, the cave dwellers measured days by their sleep cycles – losing track of time along the way.
“In our heads, we had walked into the cave 30 days ago,” said Clot. One member reportedly thought they spent only 23 days in the cave.
Christian Clot, left and an unidentified member taking part in the “Deep Time” study, work on a laptop, in the Lombrives Cave in Ussat les Bains, France. APThe unexpected human disruptions and isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit France especially hard, were among the inspirations for the experiment.
“In an extreme context, with a new way of life, we obviously did not know how to respond to the impacts of these changes as a group,” Clot said in September, according to reports out of France.
Scientists in France and Switzerland monitored the group’s sleep patterns, social interactions and behavioral reactions. Team members swallowed capsules containing tiny thermometers that were used to measure body temperature and other biometric data.
The Deep Time Project’s website says the experiment will help humans prepare for a variety of potential contingencies, including the long-term colonization of space or major geopolitical crises.
Explorer and scientist Christian Clos gives apress conference with leaving the Lombrives cave where they have spent 40 days, in Ussat-les-Bains, southern of France, on April 24, 2021. AFP via Getty Images“Our future as humans on this planet will evolve,” Clot said after emerging. “We must learn to better understand how our brains are capable of finding new solutions, whatever the situation.”
The Lombrives Cave is believed to be the largest in Europe by volume, with a length of 24 miles and one section alone, the Cathedral cave, the size of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It was the home of Neolithic cavemen up to 12,000 years ago.
