Mushrooms and Evolution - Inspired by Terence McKenna’s “Stoned Ape" Theory
People have attempted to – unsuccessfully – to answer the question of how our minds evolved from the ape. They’ve tried all kinds of things to account for this evolution. The key to unlocking this great mystery is the presence of Psilocybin in the diet of early man.
When climatological change ended the last ice age, the jungles of northern Africa receded leaving behind vast grasslands. A branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the trees and took up a life out in the open — following around herds of ungulates, nibbling what they could along the way. Among the new items in their diet were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds.
The mushroom acted as a tremendous force for directing the evolution of human beings away from that of the rest of the anthropoid apes and toward the unique adaption that we see as special to human beings today. It did this through a series of self-reinforcing tendencies:
1. Lab work shows that psilocybin eaten in small amounts increases visual acuity – increased visual acuity means increased success at hunting and gathering food.
2. At slightly higher doses of psilocybin there is sexual arousal, a factor that would increase reproductive success. So the mushroom-using population will tend to outbreed the non-mushroom population.
3. The third main factor which pushed these mushroom-using primates into a position of ascendancy, is that psilocybin at the psychedelic dose level actually stimulates the areas of the brain that are concerned with the production of language.
At high doses, psilocybin causes extremely peculiar phenomenon to manifest themselves. Vocal utterances, which are really mechanical vibrations of the skull and chest cavity, apparently become visible as fields of changing light patterns. This phenomenon is called synaesthesia and it is not uncommon with psychoactive foods.
We probably invented language long before meaning, and it was some very practical people/apes that got the idea that the words could have meaning. Before that, language was primarily verbal amusement. After all, the most readily at hand musical instrument is the human voice.
The presence of psilocybin in the diet interrupted the natural primate tendency towards male dominated hierarchies. In that moment community values; altruism, language, long-term planning, awareness of cause and effect, all the things that distinguish us developed.
For a very long time, as we evolved out of the animal nature, perhaps a hundred thousand years, psilocybin was a part of our diet, our rituals and our religion.
About 12,000 years ago, the mushrooms left the human diet as they were no longer as readily available due to factors including further climatological change. This resulted in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to pre-mushroomed and frankly brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.
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