For the vast majority of people that's just wrong. The urge to breathe is driven primarily by increasing blood CO2 levels (hypercapnia). You can learn to tolerate higher levels but to reach the point where pre-breathing pure O2 makes a difference takes extensive dedicated apnea training.
Anyone can extend breath hold times at least a little by hyperventilating first to drive down CO2 levels, thus surpressing the urge to breathe. That can be dangerous underwater as it becomes easier to go hypoxic before the urge to breathe gets overwhelming.
> For the vast majority of people that’s just wrong.
>That can be dangerous underwater as it becomes easier to go hypoxic before the urge to breathe gets overwhelming.
Again true on both counts but irrelevant, there is no reason to suppose people in 800BC where average divers. Pearl diving goes back to ~2000BC so demonstrating a very long tradition of people pushing these limits and it’s exactly the people pushing such limits that might try bringing an air supply underwater.
Sure this depiction is almost guaranteed to be a floatation device, but you build something like that and spend your life around water and people are going to try stuff.
Anyone can extend breath hold times at least a little by hyperventilating first to drive down CO2 levels, thus surpressing the urge to breathe. That can be dangerous underwater as it becomes easier to go hypoxic before the urge to breathe gets overwhelming.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17274316/
I am pretty well aware of what applies here.