The Awakened Ape Hypothesis: Why Mushrooms, Part 3

Disclaimer: I am not a healthcare provider of any kind. I am the owner of some very strong opinions based on my own personal experience. Though there are mountains of evidence for much of what I suggest, my goal is to give you space to explore these ideas, not to prove my position.

From the very first time someone shared the idea of the “Awakened Ape” with me, I believed it.

It resonates so perfectly with a whole bunch of things I already knew and a bunch of other things that I felt. In its simplest form, the hypothesis suggests that Homo erectus evolved into Homo sapiens because they ate a whole lot of magic mushrooms.

Though it was (unsurprisingly) ridiculed by lots of scientists at the time, times have changed, and so has our ability to gather quantitative evidence of the fossil record. In thirty years, the evidence in Terence McKenna’s 1992 book outlining his argument seems to have gone from “plausible” to “more than likely.”

It makes perfect sense to me. Someone was foraging, found something that looked edible, blasted off, and when they came back to earth they shared the new food (and experience) with others in their group. Pretty soon there are entire breeding groups that are consuming them regularly and needing to develop new behaviors to facilitate their new ways of thinking, so language is born. This continues until their brains move beyond survival and into leisure, connection, and appreciation of beauty.

Over a remarkably short period of time, compared to other physiological changes, our ancestors' brains got significantly larger, correlating to the emergence of language, symbolic thought, art, and complex social structures.

Things we can prove:

• Homo erectus had ample access to psilocybin mushrooms
• Homo erectus was an omnivore, and mushrooms were often included in their food mix
• Homo sapiens brains’ (and as a result, human societies) evolved significantly more rapidly than other species
• In addition to temporary alterations in consciousness, psychedelics create durable changes in gene expression
• Genes responsive to psychedelics appeared much more rapidly in proto-humans than in other mammals

All of these things support the idea that there is an evolutionary link between psilocybin consumption and human brain development.

WILD, right??

I studied human evolution and early hominid behavior pretty extensively as an Anthropology major, and I have to say that I always found the narrative to be woefully lacking. The story was that if you roll the same dice enough times over a long enough period of time, the dice will start to change. Roll the new dice enough times, you’ll get another change.

To be fair, I don’t have a concept for how many changes of this type are possible over the course of 12 million years, but I always struggled to accept a story that didn’t sufficiently explain or acknowledge the spark that makes us human.

It’s been a long time since I believed in a Judeo-Christian god, but at least that creation story clearly connects the dots between how we moved from an animal consciousness to a human one right there in the Garden of Eden. I never questioned the science of evolution, but have struggled to believe that it was purely chance that moved it one direction or the other. 

Troublingly, from here we can clearly see that the story of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge tells another story: Patriarchy establishing itself while vilifying something that limits its success.

Hear me out: If psilocybin allows humans to access levels of consciousness and connection that are otherwise unavailable to us, then removing that access dramatically simplifies the task of implementing oppressive systems. What developed through traditional practices in early societies became the enemy of a budding patriarchy. Wash, rinse, and repeat over a few thousand years all the way up to Richard Nixon and his war on drugs hippies and black folks.

If you’ve never tripped, let me tell you: Nothing exposes the lies and pain of oppressive systems like a few grams of magic mushrooms. There’s a reason why psychedelics and alternative lifestyles are so strongly correlated, but I think most folks are wrong about which one is the chicken and which the egg. I don’t use mushrooms because I have an alternative lifestyle. I have to live an alternative lifestyle because the mushrooms I have taken make a conventional one impossible. 

I’ll talk forever about the connection, self-knowledge and self-acceptance that are the primary emotional effects of psilocybin. With that lens our society that operates primarily on compliance, coercion, and control just doesn't make any sense. Which gets us all the way back to where we started: If mushrooms are the thing that made us human in the first place, I believe they are also what we need to evolve beyond our current systems. Seems to me that the individuals currently enforcing the cruelty of our culture and our country would struggle to do that if they felt genuinely connected to themselves, other people, and the planet. 

Maybe that self-knowledge and self-acceptance stuff sounds pretty good to you? Consider joining us for our first psilocybin healing retreat. Get on my calendar to ask all your questions privately.

The information provided on this website does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal or medical advice. All information, content, and materials available on this site are for general educational and informational purposes only.