Food of the Gods Chapter 2. THE MAGIC IN FOOD
Author: Terence McKenna Publisher: New York, NY: Bantam Books. Publish Date: 1992 Review Date: Status:💥
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A NEW VIEW OF HUMAN EVOLUTION
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The first encounters between hominids and psilocybin-containing mushrooms may have predated the domestication of cattle in Africa by a million years or more. And during this million-year period, the mushrooms were not only gathered and eaten but probably also achieved the status of a cult. But domestication of wild cattle, a great step in human cultural evolution, by bringing humans into greater proximity to cattle, also entailed increased contact with the mushrooms, because these mushrooms grow only in the dung of cattle. As a result, the human-mushroom interspecies codependency was enhanced and deepened. It was at this time that religious ritual, calendar making, and natural magic came into their own.
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Shortly after humans encountered the visionary fungi of the African grasslands, and like the leafcutter ants, we too became the dominant species of our area, and we too learned ways of “keeping the bulk of our populations safe in subterranean retreats.” In our case these retreats were walled cities.
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In pondering the course of human evolution, some thoughtful observers have questioned the scenario that physical anthropologists present us. Evolution in higher animals takes a long time to occur, operating in time spans of rarely less than a million years and more often in tens of millions of years. But the emergence of modern humans from the higher primates-with the enormous changes effected in brain size and behavior-transpired in fewer than three million years. Physically, in the last 100,000 years, we have apparently changed very little. But the amazing proliferation of cultures, social institutions, and linguistic systems has come so quickly that modern evolutionary biologists can scarcely account for it. Most do not even attempt an explanation.
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Indeed, the absence of a theoretical model is not surprising; there is much that we do not know about the complex situation prevailing among the hominids just prior to and during the time when modern human beings were emerging onto the scene. Biological and fossil evidence clearly indicates that man is descended from primate ancestors not radically different from primate species still extant, and yet Homo sapiens obviously is in a class apart from other members of the order.
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Thinking about human evolution ultimately means thinking about the evolution of human consciousness. What, then, are the origins of the human mind? In their explanations, some investigators have adopted a primarily cultural emphasis. They point to our unique linguistic and symbolical capabilities, our use of tools, and our ability to store information epigenetically as songs, art, books, computers, thereby creating not only culture, but also history.
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Others, taking a somewhat more biological approach, have emphasized our physiological and neurological peculiarities, including the exceptionally large size and complexity of the human neocortex, a great proportion of which is devoted to complex linguistic processing, storage, and retrieval of information, as well as being associated with motor systems governing activities like speech and writing.
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More recently the feedback interactions between cultural influence and biological ontogeny have been recognized and seen to be involved in certain human developmental oddities, such as prolonged childhood and adolescence, the delayed onset of sexual maturity, and the persistence of many essentially neonatal characteristics through adult life. Unfortunately the union of these points of view has not yet led to the recognition of the genome-shaping power of psychoactive and physioactive dietary constituents.
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By 3 million years ago, and through a combination of the processes discussed above, at least three clearly recognized species of protohominids were in place in East Africa. These were Homo africanus, Homo boisei, and Homo robustus. Also at that time, the omnivorous Homo habilis, the first true hominid, had clearly emerged from a division of species that also gave rise to two vegetarian man-apes.
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The grasslands expanded slowly; early hominids moved through a mosaic of grasslands and forests. These creatures, with brains proportionately only slightly larger than chimpanzees’, were already walking upright and probably carrying food and tools between patches of forest which they continued to exploit for tubers and insects. Their arms were proportionately longer than ours, and they possessed a more powerful grasping hand. The evolution to upright posture and the initial expansion into a grassland niche had occurred earlier, between 9 and 5 million years ago. Unfortunately we lack fossil evidence for this earlier transition.
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The hominids likely expanded their original diet of fruit and small animal kills by including underground roots, tubers, and corms. A simple digging stick would allow access to this previously untapped food source. Modern baboons on the savannah subsist largely on grass corms during certain seasons. Chimpanzees add substantial amounts of beans to their diet when they venture onto the savannah. Both baboons and chimpanzees hunt cooperatively and prey on small animals. They do not generally use tools in hunting, however, and there is no evidence that early hominids did either. Among chimps, baboons, and hominids, hunting appears to be a male activity. Early hominids hunted both cooperatively and alone.
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With Homo habilis began a sudden and mysterious expansion of brain size. Homo habilis’s brain weighed an average 770 grams (27. 5 ounces), compared with 530 grams (19 ounces) for competing hominids. The next two and a quarter million years brought an unusually rapid evolution in brain size and complexity. By 750,000 to 1.1 million years ago a new hominid type, Homo erectus, was widespread. The brain size of this new hominid was 900 to 1100 grams (2 to 2.4 pounds). Evidence is good that Homo erectus used tools and possessed some sort of rudimentary culture. At Choukoutien Cave in South Africa, there is good evidence of fire use along with burnt bones indicating the cooking of meat. These are attributed to Homo erectus, which was the earliest hominid to leave Africa, a million or so years ago.
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Older theories suggested that modern humans evolved from Homo erectus in different locales. Increasingly, however, modern evolutionary primatologists accept the notion that modern Homo sapiens also arose in Africa, some 100,000 years ago, and made a second great outward migration from there to people the entire planet. At Border Cave and the Klasies River Mouth Cave in South Africa, there is evidence of the earliest modern Homo sapiens living in a mixed forest and grassland environment.
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In one of many .attempts to understand this momentous transition, Charles J. Lumsden and Edward O. Wilson wrote:
Behavioral ecologists have gradually assembled a theory to explain why the advance to an erect posture was taken, one that accounts for many of the most distinctive biological traits of modern man. The earliest man-apes shifted out of the tropical evergreen forest into more open, seasonal habitats, where they became committed to an exclusively terrestrial existence. They constructed base camps and became dependent on a division of labor, by which some individuals, probably the females, wandered less and devoted more time to the care of the young; others, primarily or exclusively the males, dispersed widely in the search for animal prey. Bi-pedalism conferred a great advantage in open-country locomotion. It also freed the arms, permitting the ancestral man-apes to use tools and to carry dead animals and other food back to the base camp. Food sharing and related forms of reciprocity automatically followed as central processes of the social life of the man-apes. So did close, long-term sexual bonding and heightened sexuality, which were put to the service of rearing the young. Many of the most distinctive forms of human social behavior are the product of this tightly interwoven complex of adaptation.
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One advanced hominid type followed another in the African evolutionary laboratory, and, beginning with Homo erectus, representatives of each type radiated across the Eurasian landmass in the interglacial periods. During each glaciation, migration out of Africa was bottled up; new hominids were “cooked” in the African ambience of intensified forces of mutation from exotic diets and climatically induced increased natural selection.
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At the end of these truly remarkable three million years in the evolution of the human species, human brain size had tripled! Lumsden and Wilson call this “perhaps the fastest advance recorded for any complex organ in the whole history of life.“’ Such a remarkable rate of evolutionary change in the primary organ of a species implies the presence of extraordinary selective pressures.
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Because scientists were unable to explain this tripling of the human brain size in so short a span of evolutionary time, some of the early primate paleontologists and evolutionary theorists predicted and searched for evidence of transitional skeletons. Today the idea of a “missing link” has largely been abandoned. Bipedalism, binocular vision, the opposable thumb, the throwing arm-all have been put forth as the key ingredient in the mix that caused selfreflecting humans to crystallize out of the caldron of competing hominid types and strategies. Yet all we really know is that the shift in brain size was accompanied by remarkable changes in the social organization of the hominids. They became users of tools, fire, and language. They began the process as higher animals and emerged from it 100,000 years ago as conscious, self-aware individuals.
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THE REAL MISSING LINK
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My contention is that mutation-causing, psychoactive chemical compounds in the early human diet directly influenced the rapid reorganization of the brain’s information-processing capacities. Alkaloids in plants, specifically the hallucinogenic compounds such as psilocybin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and harmaline, could be the chemical factors in the protohuman diet that catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection. The action of hallucinogens present in many common plants enhanced our informationprocessing activity, or environmental sensitivity, and thus contributed to the sudden expansion of the human brain size. At a later stage in this same process, hallucinogens acted as catalysts in the development of imagination, fueling the creation of internal stratagems and hopes that may well have synergized the emergence of language and religion.
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In research done in the late 1960s, Roland Fischer gave small amounts of psilocybin to graduate students and then measured their ability to detect the moment when previously parallel lines became skewed. He found that performance ability on this particular task was actually improved after small doses of psilocybin.5
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When I discussed these findings with Fischer, he smiled after explaining his conclusions, then summed up, “You see what is conclusively proven here is that under certain circumstances one is actually better informed concerning the real world if one has taken a drug than if one has not.” His facetious remark stuck with me, first as an academic anecdote, later as an effort on his part to communicate something profound. What would be the consequences for evolutionary theory of admitting that some chemical habits confer adaptive advantage and thereby become deeply scripted in the behavior and even genome of some individuals?
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THREE BIG STEPS FOR THE HUMAN RACE
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Let us imagine for a moment that we stand outside the surging gene swarm that is biological history, and that we can see the interwoven consequences of changes in diet and climate, which must certainly have been too slow to be felt by our ancestors. The scenario that unfolds involves the interconnected and mutually reinforcing effects of psilocybin taken at three different levels. Unique in its properties, psilocybin is the only substance, I believe, that could yield this scenario.
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At the first, low, level of usage is the effect that Fischer noted: small amounts of psilocybin, consumed with no awareness of its psychoactivity while in the general act of browsing for food, and perhaps later consumed consciously, impart a noticeable increase in visual acuity, especially edge detection. As visual acuity is at a premium among hunter-gatherers, the discovery of the equivalent of “chemical binoculars” could not fail to have an impact on the hunting and gathering success of those individuals who availed themselves of this advantage. Partnership groups containing individuals with improved eyesight will be more successful at feeding their offspring. Because of the increase in available food, the offspring within such groups will have a higher probability of themselves reaching reproductive age. In such a situation, the out breeding (or decline) of non-psilocybin-using groups would be a natural consequence.
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Because psilocybin is a stimulant of the central nervous system, when taken in slightly larger doses, it tends to trigger restlessness and sexual arousal. Thus, at this second level of usage, by increasing instances of copulation, the mushrooms directly favored human reproduction. The tendency to regulate and schedule sexual activity within the group, by linking it to a lunar cycle of mushroom availability, may have been important as a first step toward ritual and religion. Certainly at the third and highest level of usage, religious concerns would be at the forefront of the tribe’s consciousness, simply because of the power and strangeness of the experience itself.
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This third level, then, is the level of the full-blown shamanic ecstasy. The psilocybin intoxication is a rapture whose breadth and depth is the despair of prose. It is wholly Other and no less mysterious to us than it was to our mushroom-munching ancestors. The boundary-dissolving qualities of shamanic ecstasy predispose hallucinogen-using tribal groups to community bonding and to group sexual activities, which promote gene mixing, higher birth rates, and a communal sense of responsibility for the group offspring.
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At whatever dose the mushroom was used, it possessed the magical property of conferring adaptive advantages upon its archaic users and their group. Increased visual acuity, sexual arousal, and access to the transcendent Other led to success in obtaining food, sexual prowess and stamina, abundance of offspring, and access to realms of supernatural power. All of these advantages can be easily selfregulated through manipulation of dosage and frequency of ingestion. Chapter 4 will detail psilocybin’s remarkable property of stimulating the language-forming capacity of the brain. Its power is so extraordinary that psilocybin can be considered the catalyst to the human development of language.
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STEERING CLEAR OF LAMARCK
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An objection to these ideas inevitably arises and should be dealt with. This scenario of human emergence may seem to smack of Lamarckism, which theorizes that characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be passed on to its progeny. The classic example is the claim that giraffes have long necks because they stretch their necks to reach high branches. This straightforward and rather common-sense idea is absolutely anathema among neoDarwinians, who currently hold the high ground in evolutionary theory. Their position is that mutations are entirely random and that only after the mutations are expressed as the traits of organisms does natural selection mindlessly and dispassionately fulfill its function of preserving those individuals upon whom an adaptive advantage had been conferred.
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Their objection can be put like this: While the mushrooms may have given us better eyesight, sex, and language when eaten, how did these enhancements get into the human genome and become innately human? Nongenetic enhancements of an organism’s functioning made by outside agents retard the corresponding genetic reservoirs of those facilities by rendering them superfluous. In other words, if a necessary metabolite is common in available food, there will not be pressure to develop a trait for endogenous expression of the metabolite. Mushroom use would thus create individuals with less visual acuity, language facility, and consciousness. Nature would not provide those enhancements through organic evolution because the metabolic investment required to sustain them wouldn’t pay off, relative to the tiny metabolic investment required to eat mushrooms. And yet today we all have these enhancements, without taking mushrooms. So how did the mushroom modifications get into the genome?
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The short answer to this objection, one that requires no defense of Lamarck’s ideas, is that the presence of psilocybin in the hominid diet changed the parameters of the process of natural selection by changing the behavioral patterns upon which that selection was operating. Experimentation with many types of foods was causing a general increase in the numbers of random mutations being offered up to the process of natural selection, while the augmentation of visual acuity, language use, and ritual activity through the use of psilocybin represented new behaviors. One of these new behaviors, language use, previously only a marginally important trait, was suddenly very useful in the context of new hunting and gathering lifestyles. Hence psilocybin inclusion in the diet shifted the parameters of human behavior in favor of patterns of activity that promoted increased language; acquisition of language led to more vocabulary and an expanded memory capacity. The psilocybin-using individuals evolved epigenetic rules or cultural forms that enabled them to survive and reproduce better than other individuals. Eventually the more successful epigenetically based styles of behavior spread through the populations along with the genes that reinforce them. In this fashion the population would evolve genetically and cul turally.
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As for visual acuity, perhaps the widespread need for corrective lenses among modern humans is a legacy of the long period o “artificial” enhancement of vision through psilocybin use. After all, atrophy of the olfactory abilities of human beings is thought by one school to be a result of a need for hungry omnivores to tolerate strong smells and tastes, perhaps even carrion. Trade-offs of this sort are common in evolution. The suppression of keenness of tasty and smell would allow inclusion of foods in the diet that migh otherwise be passed over as “too strong.” Or it may indicate some thing more profound about our evolutionary relationship to diet My brother Dennis has written:
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The apparent atrophy of the human olfactory system may actually represent a functional shift in a set of primitive, externally directed chemo-receptors to an interiorized regulatory function. This function may be related to the control of the human pheromonal system, which is largely under the control of the pineal gland, and which mediates, on a subliminal level, a host of psycho-sexual and psycho-social interactions between individuals. The pineal tends to suppress gonadal development and the onset of puberty, among other functions, and this mechanism may play a role in the persistence of neonatal characteristics in the human species. Delayed maturation and prolonged childhood and adolescence play a critical role in the neurological and psychological development of the individual, since they provide the circumstances which permit the post-natal development of the brain in the early, formative years of childhood. The symbolic, cognitive and linguistic stimuli that the brain experiences during this period are essential to its development and are the factors that make us the unique, conscious, symbol-manipulating, language-using beings that we are.
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Neuroactive amines and alkaloids in the diet of early primates may have played a role in the biochemical activation of the pineal gland and the resulting adaptations.
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ACQUIRED TASTES