The "Stoned Ape" Hypothesis

After a chat about my post on the Electric Kool-Aid John's Hopkins Acid Test, hallucinogen baker and aspiring psychedelic botanist DJ Robot recently turned me onto the drug-addled waxings of Terrance McKenna. McKenna, a philosopher, ethnobotanist, druggie and rare plant collector, has posited some theories about the involvement of psilocybin mushrooms in human evolution that are so outstandingly ludicrous and awesome that I wish I thought of them myself. His brilliant hypotheses are so far-fetched that they almost make my position on Lewis' Carroll's prophetic nature seem plausible, but beyond the mushroom jazz, there are some interesting thoughts on agriculture and the development of a human ego.

McKenna states in an interview with Omni Magazine (May 1993)

Lab work shows that psilocybin eaten in amounts so small that it can't be detected, as an experience, increases visual acuity. In the Sixties, Roland Fisher at the National Institute of Mental Health gave graduate students psilocybin and then a battery of eye tests. His results indicated that edges were visually detected more readily if a bit of psilocybin was present in the student's body. Well, edge detection is exactly what hunting animals in the grassland environments use to observe distant prey! So here you have this chemical factor; when added to the diet, it results in greater success in hunting. That, in turn, results in greater success in child rearing and so increases the size of the next generation.

As we descended from the trees and into the grasslands, began to experiment with bipedal gait and omnivorous diet, we encountered mushrooms. At low does, they increase visual acuity; at midrange, they cause general central-nervous system arousal, which in a highly sexed primate means a lot of horsing around, which means there is more pregnancy among females associated with psilocybin-using behavior. Higher dosages of psilocybin leads to group sexuality and dissolved boundaries between ecstasy.


Unfortunately, McKenna has no evidence to support this claim, but I'd be hard pressed to come up with a more revolutionary theory about how humans made the Great Leap. Even if I did, I could never top the "Stoned Ape" moniker...

The mushroom daze were over as African plain began to dry up and the proto-hippies were forced to grow their own food due to scarcity -- the birth of agriculture (so says McKenna -- I'd have gone with Ferticle Crescent as an exact locale, but I'm not the one choking down fungus like Cheerios). But agriculture was born with an evil twin: Ego. If this is already a well known psychological milestone, I've not been made aware of it.

From 75,000 to about 15,000 years ago, there was a kind of human paradise on Earth. People danced, sang, had poetry, jokes, riddles, intrigue, and weapons, but they didn't possess the notion of ego as we've allowed it to crystallize in Western societies. The reason for this lack of ego was a social style of mushroom taking and an orgiastic sexual style that was probably lunar in its timing. Nobody went more than three or four weeks before they were redissolved into pure feeling and boundary dissolution. Community, loyalty, altruism, self-sacrifice -- all these values that we take to be the basis of humanness -- arose at the time in a situation in which the ego was absent.

[Riddles indeed...I'm quite sure I've seen "How do you feed 16 apes with only 15 apples?" scrawled onto a cave wall somewhere...]

Agriculture represents an intellectual understanding of how cause and effect can be separated in time. You return to last year's camp, look where you discarded the trash, and there all in one place are the food planets you so carefully gathered. Women, the gatherers, put this together: Wow! Bury food, come back a year later, and it's there. This was a watershed in the development of abstract thought.

At the same time, men were understanding that the sex act, previously associated with this group orgiastic stuff, was the equivalent of burying food and coming back a year later! Male paternity is recognized as a phenomenon. The road to hell is paved -- eight lanes! -- from that point on. The man thinks my - - my children, not our children -- and therefore, animals I kill are food for my woman and my children. Woman are seen as property. The ego is rampant and in full force.

This is all fascinating, but under the slightest bit of scrutiny it dissipates faster than a whip-it. Agriculture was preceded by the hunter-gatherer model, which already placed the male species in a power position and if a species has the mental faculties to tell jokes/riddles/sing/make weapons (no, I don't think they did any of these save the tethering of a sharp rock to a stick), then it follows that they could infer that sex=babies.

Depiste the above, it doesn't matter to me that his theories are nothing more than shamanistic drug visions. They are amazing to read about because they are so far removed from anything that's out there. So what if it's wrong? The beauty of science and philsophy and independent thought is that you can be wrong and you can ask, "What if...?"

Maybe we didn't make the Great Leap because a pack of silver backs chowed down on shrooms, but one thing is for sure: We made it by thinking outside the comfortable boundaries.

And for the record: To feed the 16 apes with 15 apples?

Make applesauce.