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When we think of drug use in current society, we rarely consider how many of us rely on them daily, whether it is a cup of caffeine in the morning (64% of Americans drank coffee daily in 2018) or prescriptions that make it easier to function (22% of those aged 40-79 in the United States reported using five or more prescription drugs in the last 30 days).
Subconsciously, substances like caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, and over the counter or prescription medications are accepted and widely used, while others like psychedelic mushrooms, LSD and MDMA are taboo and perceived as having little to no value in society. However, humans have not always abided by this “unspoken” rule. Psychedelics and psychoactive plants were a large part of the culture in ancient civilizations, and likely impacted humans farther back in time than what archaeological records can prove. Today, psilocybin, DMT, cannabis and mescaline are all classified as Schedule I drugs in the United States, which means they have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” However, history paints a different picture of psychedelic drugs.
What Are Psychedelics?
Psychedelics are a subclass of dissociative drugs, often also referred to as hallucinogens, and include psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, ayahuasca, DMT, and peyote/mescaline. The role of psychedelics in today’s society is less around reliance and convenience like we see with caffeine and painkillers, and more of a recreational event or spiritual experience. As time has gone on, though, humans have drifted away from taking psychedelics such as mushrooms and LSD for the purpose of gaining insight and experiencing deeper levels of consciousness, and more so for the fun of tripping and getting high. This has started to change as some research institutions are starting to evaluate the use of psychedelics as medicine, but we have far strayed from the reverence and utility that early civilizations showed for their powerful psychoactive plants. We have proven that cultures and civilizations going back thousands of years have used a wide range of psychoactive plants as part of their culture. Some argue, however, that drugs such as psilocybin mushrooms have been with early humans for much, much longer, playing a pivotal role in our evolution.
An Evolutionary Feat and Unconventional Explanation
Over millions of years, factors like climate, predators, and other social stressors have been molding our body into what is our current evolved form. The features that make us “human”, the characteristics that define us, are part of an evolutionary process that were solutions to a changing environment. These characteristics of bipedalism, tool use and technology, increased brain size are widely recognized to be what sets us apart from our primate relatives, the chimpanzee, gorilla, and orangutan. These features must have been selected for us to persist, meaning that those early primates who were bipedal and used tools were better off than those who did not. This concept of natural selection is the key mechanism through which evolution occurs. However, evolution takes many, many, many years.
For example, the first fossil evidence of primate bipedalism and upright walking dates to roughly six million years ago when the climate cooled in present-day eastern Africa changed from tropical forests to forested savannas. That was simply the first instance of recorded bipedalism, and it took an additional two million years for early primates to be mostly or entirely bipedal. So when we realized that braincase volume (an indicator of brain size) in early humans doubled from roughly 800,000 years ago to 200,000 years ago, we can appreciate that this rapid increase is no small feat. Evolutionarily, 600,000 years for such a substantial and rapid change is truly a blink of an eye. It also remains a bit of a scientific wonder, and there are many theories about what led to this seemingly instantaneous growth of brain size capacity. While some proposed eating meat, social competition, or the development of tool use for parts of human evolution, others have rather creative proposals to explain this feat.
The Stoned Ape Theory
In 1992, Terence McKenna published his book, Food of the Gods, which provided a radically inventive explanation known as the Stoned Ape Theory.
In the words of McKenna, the missing link is the psilocybin mushroom being “the triggering factor that moved us from being an advanced hominin, an advanced animal, to being… a conscious, self-reflecting, caring, thinking, dreaming, striving human being.” He argues that early ancestors were bound to have ingested small doses of psilocybin mushrooms in their search for food sources, especially as terrain and climate changed, which may have had positive impacts on our ability to hunt. At larger doses, these mushrooms would have increased sexual arousal, dissolved the ego, endorsed altruism, and contributed to the development of language, religion, and artistic forms.
As a result of these encounters, McKenna believes we “ate our way to higher consciousness” through a reorganization of our primitive brain. Could it be possible that a mild trip on mushrooms was the catalyst to the most significant evolutionary development in our history? Our consciousness and intellect are what we use to distinguish ourselves from other animals and our close primate relatives… and the difference was that my great, great, great, great, great, great, great x500 grandfather was stoned in the grasslands?
As you might expect, McKenna was faced with many skeptics and negations. A key part of McKenna’s hypothesis included the claim that, at small doses, psilocybin increases visual acuity and thus increased our ancestors’ success in hunting. While this visual acuity would certainly have increased odds of survival and been selected for through natural selection, many claim McKenna misled or misrepresented the basis of this claim of visual clarity. Since his proposal in 1992, anthropologists have made many advancements in our understanding of human origins, creating the potential for inaccuracies in McKenna’s research of dates and climate.
Despite the criticism, esteemed mycologist Paul Stamets recently advocated for the reconsideration of McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory at conferences and during interviews. According to Stamets, “this is a very, very plausible hypothesis for the sudden evolution of Homo sapiens from our primate relatives” and as an explanation for the evolutionary feat of our increase in brain size.
With early primates being hunter-gatherer societies, it’s easy to imagine they stumbled across psychoactive plants such as psilocybin mushrooms. Rather than be fixated on the outdated details, perhaps we should be open to considering that psychoactive plants may have played a significant role in the development and evolution of early primates. Despite the kinks in McKenna’s original hypothesis, the overpowering experience of a psychedelic “trip” is nothing short of a phenomenon, and there is no telling how early hominins may have come out of that experience hundreds of thousands of years ago. Further, while it tends to be increasingly difficult to find archaeological evidence the farther back in history we go, we do have an abundance of evidence that psychoactive plants and drugs have been intertwined with humans for thousands of years.
Ancient Civilizations and Archaeological Evidence of Psychedelics
From shamanism to religious ceremonies to war to healing, civilizations have found plenty of uses for drugs. For thousands of years, civilizations have ceremoniously or therapeutically used poppy plants and the active component opium (Romans, Greeks, Indians, Egyptians, Sumerians), coca leaves (Mayans, Egyptians), and nicotine (Mayans, Ohlone Native Americans, Egyptians). Interestingly, many of these civilizations have also shown evidence of repeatedly using mind-altering and hallucinogenic drugs, with the earliest archaeological evidence for the use of psychoactive plants dates to roughly 10,000 years ago with traces of the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus found in a cave in Peru.
Peyote has been used by indigenous people in Mexico and southwestern United States for sacred rituals from 3,000 years to possibly 5,700 years ago, as indicated by cave paintings and other archaeological evidence. The plant is still used today after the Native American Church won a legal battle protecting their right to use the plant in mixed drinks for religious and ceremonial purposes. The peyote cactus, which contains a psychoactive component called mescaline, was thought to have the ability to cure any disease if used properly, and was considered to be their most valuable medicine.
In addition to peyote, psilocybin (or “magic mushrooms”) was also widespread in its use. The Aztecs referred to mushrooms as “Teonanacatl” or “God’s Flesh,” and was likely used for ceremonial rituals. Mushroom-shaped stone effigies were found in Mayan tombs and other sacred sites across Mexico, Guatemala, and other Central American countries with its purpose being to grind the mushrooms for consumption. The Aztecs and Mayans used mushrooms for rituals of worshipping, or even recreationally. In Siberia, people used a local mushroom Amanita Muscaria for religious purposes. In India, Soma is an ancient, religious drink made from magic mushrooms that was identified as a source of inspiration for the ancient texts of the Vedas, which constituted the oldest scriptures of Hinduism. Psychedelic mushrooms have clearly held a significant relationship in human culture for thousands of years.
In the Amazon region of South America, Ayahuasca is a ceremonial drink made by tribes that were largely used for healing but have also been reported to be used in warfare or gaining artistic inspiration. The earliest evidence of the use of ayahuasca is a 1,000-year-old pouch containing the ingredients for the famous drink. The two main ingredients of the drink, when combined, produce a powerful and potent drink through the psychedelic chemical N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. This chemical creates powerful hallucinations and out-of-body experiences, described as “the most powerful hallucinogen known to man and science.”
In Ancient Greece, a secret yearly ritual included “profoundly influential” individuals descending into a cave to consume a drink called kykeon. These people included “virtually every ancient writer, thinker, ruler, or builder whose name we know today from… 1500 BCE until… 392 CE.” Plato, influenced by this mysterious ritual, wrote that those initiated could “dwell amongst the Gods.” Hypotheses suggest this drink may have included ergot (a substance that mimics LSD’s hallucinogenic effects), Amanita muscaria mushrooms, or it may have been an Ayahuasca equivalent.
While we may never know the full range and extent of drug use in ancient times, there is no arguing against the widespread use across nearly all civilizations. The purposes may have been religious, spiritual, medicinal, or even curiosity. If you had asked Terence McKenna, he would tell you mushrooms enabled humans to expand consciousness and increase brain size. While we may never know if his statement is true, we can certainly show through many separate incidences of archaeological evidence that hallucinogens and psychoactive plants have been in the middle of the evolution of human culture, community, and spirituality.
History Repeats Itself
When we think of how today’s most affluent societies portray psychedelic drugs including psilocybin, LSD, cannabis, and peyote, we may think of “bad trips”, the (poor) portrayals from films, or maybe that one ad from childhood illustrating “your brain on drugs.” Only in the last few decades have we started to scientifically recognize the medicinal properties and how we can reap the non-addictive benefits from many of the drugs previously considered criminal or forbidden.
In the United States alone, there are currently over 500 studies for cannabis across a range of topics, from HIV neuropathic pain to multiple sclerosis to insulin sensitivity. Similarly, psilocybin is being studied for its potential as a therapy or treatment for anorexia nervosa, OCD, migraines, cocaine and opioid use disorders, alcohol dependence, and anxiety in people with Stage IV melanoma. And this may be just the tip of the iceberg of the potential for these hallucinogens and psychoactive plants.
While these progressions in medicine are significant, we must also recognize that we are just starting take steps forward after we have cumulatively taken two hundred steps back from our early ancestors and early civilizations. Ancient civilizations used certain psychoactive plants to embrace physical and emotional healing, and promote a communal, altruistic culture. And before that, early hominins may have even experienced psilocybin as a catalyst for expansion in consciousness, language, and art.
Though archaeological evidence is scarce and scattered, it does not take much imagination to consider a time where early sapiens stumbled across mushrooms with the intention of hushing a grumbling stomach, shamans from civilizations thousands of years ago drank ayahuasca to search for answers from the spirits for their tribe, or your great, great, great, great, great grandfather smoked a cannabis plant to soothe his aches. Moving forward, with human’s ever-expanding knowledge and scientific curiosity, and given we may owe our bigger brains to a mycelium mushroom, there truly is no telling how our species might continue to evolve alongside these psychoactive plants in the future.