Origins of Psychedelia, Part 2

A Trigger Event

Before I post part 2 of my chapter in Dream on the Rock, a comment on “Recent Evidence” that I tacked on to the Evolution chapter in the Kindle version of Kosmos.

Recent Evidence

I have been collecting studies that bear on my proposed evolutionary scenario since writing the original chapter for KOSMOS in the early 1990s. What is most obvious today is that the entire body of evidence, pro- and con-, has become much more complicated to the extent that it becomes impossible to construct a time-line reasonably consistent with all the new facts and findings. It is even difficult now to evaluate the importance of certain events such as the Toba eruption, for example.¹

As for human dispersal out of Africa, movements and migrations, genetic analysis, single- vs. multiple-origin theories of modern humans, et al., the findings of the past 20 years also complicate matters greatly. Three papers in the journal Nature by three of the original proponents of Out-of-Africa are worth reading,

Chris Stringer: “Human evolution: Out of Ethiopia”, NATURE 423, 692 - 695 (12 June 2003)

Rebecca L. Cann: “Human evolution: Tangled genetic routes”, NATURE 416, 32 - 33 (07 March 2002)

Alan Templeton: “Out of Africa again and again”, NATURE 416, 45 - 51 (07 March 2002)

However, in a more recent paper entitled “Why we are not all multiregionalists now” Chris Stringer shows that the multiregionalist camp is alive and well—well maybe not all that well... He concludes,

‘Modernity’ was not a package that had a single African origin in one time, place, and population, but was a composite whose elements appeared, and sometimes disappeared, at different times and places and then coalesced to assume the form we see in extant humans. However, during the past 400,000 years, most of that assembly took place in Africa, which is why a recent African origin still represents the predominant (but not exclusive) mode of evolution for H. sapiens. Rather than saying ‘we are all multiregionalists trying to explain the out-of-Africa pattern’, it would be more appropriate to say ‘we are all out-of-Africanists who accept some multiregional contributions’.²

I have duplicated some these papers at http://www.psychedelic-library.org/Kosmos Additional articles are also available there, a few among many to be found online, and illustrate well the rapid and perhaps bewildering developments concerning human origins:

“Bones of Stone Age boy challenge single-origin theory of modern humans” Cosmos September 2017

“Humans Migrated Out of Africa to Escape Drying Climate, New Study Says” Science News, October 2017

“Revising the story of the dispersal of modern humans across Eurasia”, Science Daily, December 2017

“Human Dispersal Out of Africa: A Lasting Debate”, Evolutionary Bioinformatics 2015:11

“Rethinking the origins of Homo sapiens” Cosmos 16 July 2018

“Did Our Species Evolve in Subdivided Populations across Africa, and Why Does It Matter?” Trends in Ecology & Evolution Volume 33, ISSUE 8, P582-594, August 01, 2018

Assimilating all the latest studies in the rapidly developing field is quite beyond my enthusiasm at this point, and I think it has now become impossible to devise a scenario that would show with any degree of confidence the when and where of a psychedelic awakening. It even seems that any general agreement and theory of human origins and dispersal is becoming ever more difficult to achieve. A great many viewpoints are contending.

If a “when and where” enquiry seems increasingly to lead to little that is useful for understanding human origins, what remains for positing a “psychedelic awakening” are the following considerations:

1) The extremely long period between the first anatomically modern humans and—much later—the rapid flowering of cognitively modern humans. This consideration applies even if the definition of anatomically-modern has become more diffuse. Presumably the minor anatomical differences that qualify as modern, cited by Stringer and others for the various groups back to 300,000Ka, still leave all representatives as possessing complex language and other characteristics that are required for psychedelic awakening and the genesis of a shamanic tradition.

2) The prevalence of psychedelic shamanism worldwide, both in recorded history and evidence of the same in prehistoric times.

3) The little disputed claim that the seeking of altered states of consciousness is a human universal.

4) The general agreement that culture arose rather rapidly compared to the long period of stasis, and that there seems to have been some kind of trigger event that precipitated the trend.

Points number 1 and 2 effectively “sqeeze” the argument from both sides. Our exceedingly long gestation during which we were not-yet-cognitively-human (and a couple of thousand years is a long time, not to mention 200 or 300 thousand years) indicates that Habit-Routine-governed existence was a powerful evolutionary characteristic completely holding us in check. This in turn necessitates a sudden and overpowering catalytic influence to overcome the long-enduring social-scale HR-governed mode of existence. And then the near-universal prevalence of psychedelic shamanism later in the game, not very long after the proposed awakening, must demonstrate that these practices originate from and during the awakening period, and that they accompanied modern humans in their migrations to all parts of the globe. If ASCs are to be a human universal, it seems obvious they would not have sprung into existence at random, independently, yet world-wide. Surely there would have been many groups of humans who never developed the shamanic tradition were it not a universal. Yet in every corner of the earth, we see one or more psychoactive plants becoming of major importance. This could not have been a hit-or-miss occasional scenario, but rather it indicates that before his migrations Early Man already knew about psychoactive plants and had a shamanic tradition for governing their use.

As man emerged from his brutish past, thousands of years ago, there was a stage in the evolution of his awareness when the discovery of a mushroom (or was it a higher plant?) with miraculous properties was a revelation to him, a veritable detonator to his soul, arousing in him sentiments of awe and reverence, and gentleness and love, to the highest pitch of which mankind is capable, all those sentiments and virtues that mankind has ever since regarded as the highest attribute of his kind. It made him see what this perishing mortal eye cannot see. How right the Greeks were to hedge about this Mystery, this imbibing of the potion, with secrecy and surveillance! What today is resolved into a mere drug, a tryptamine or lysergic acid derivative, was for him a prodigious miracle, inspiring in him poetry and philosophy and religion. Perhaps with all our modern knowledge we do not need the divine mushrooms any more. Or do we need them more than ever? Some are shocked that the key even to religion might be reduced to a mere drug. On the other hand, the drug is as mysterious as it ever was: "like the wind that comes we know not whence nor why." Out of a mere drug comes the ineffable, comes ecstasy. It is not the only instance in the history of humankind where the lowly has given birth to the divine. Altering a sacred text, we would say that this paradox is a hard saying, yet one worthy of all men to be believed. ³

The Trigger Event

- from Gosso & Webster — Dream on the Rock, chapter IV

In looking at the combined evidence from new interpretations of the ‘stones and bones,’ (Chris Stringer’s findings), the genetic evidence, (now far more convincing than just a few years ago), and other pieces of the puzzle, Stringer and other workers have come to the conclusion that there must have been some kind of unusual event, some catalyst, some kind of ‘trigger’ which set in motion the very rapid rise of human culture and civilization which began a mere few moments ago on an evolutionary scale. [29] The strong evidence for a population bottleneck, during which time individuals existed who were our sole ancestors, and the ensuing rapid migration and rapid rise of human culture in every corner of the earth, has led these workers to ask a central and important question for which they have not yet formulated an answer. Stringer and McKie write:

It was one of the critical events in mankind's convoluted route to evolutionary success. The nature of the trigger of this great social upheaval is still hotly debated, but remains a mystery at the heart of our 'progress' as a species. Was it a biological, mental or social event that sent our species rushing pell-mell towards world domination? Was it the advent of symbolic language, the appearance of the nuclear family as the basic element of human social structure, or a fundamental change in the workings of the brain? Whatever the nature of the change, it has a lot to answer for. It transformed us from minor bit players in a zoological soap opera into evolutionary superstars, with all the attendant dangers of vanity, hubris and indifference to the fate of others that such an analogy carries with it. [30]

Reading this paragraph in African Exodus when it was first published, I realized I had been for several years working on ideas which constituted the very answer sought by this recent revolution in thinking about human evolution. It was a falling into place of pieces of a puzzle which justified so much earlier ‘wild speculation,’ a realization that practically by accident I had found a key that many others were actively searching for which would enable the opening of a door to an important future in understanding.

Rebecca Cann asks,

We often wonder if language played a part of the process, and that our ancestors all had some new mutations which allowed them to spread, at the expense of the other indigenous peoples. [Results of genetic research] suggest the spread of our ancestors was rapid, with little mixing. [31]

Although language certainly played a part in the process, as I have already discussed, the identity of the trigger, the origin of the population bottleneck, the reason behind man’s migration to the ends of the earth, the factor enabling the rapid rise of culture independently in all these regions, the factor behind the ability of the new hominids to out-compete all former races of archaic man, the secret of the birth of the human race, may all be intimately related to one and the same phenomenon: the advent of socially-relevant psychoactive plant use by a regionally isolated group of proto-humans somewhere in Africa. Such use might then have spread with the spread of the descendants of this core group of individuals, mimicking a population bottleneck in that psychoactive use and the advantages it provided were closely guarded secrets not evident or available to competing ‘tribes.’ As I stated previously, if a member of a competing tribe were to use the new medicine, it would only serve to isolate him from his own group. Psychoactive use could then have been at once the reason for an apparent but not necessarily absolute bottleneck, and also the trigger, the key which enabled this original group to expand and prosper by virtue of the cognitive advantages provided by the cumulative effects of psychoactive use. These advantages, I remind the reader, concern a new and powerful ability to suspend a mode of existence entirely governed by habit routine. The advanced ape that was our predecessor necessarily had, as I have stated above, the most complete, one might say irrevocable dependence on habit routine of any animal yet evolved, a dependence entirely precluding the use of the most advanced nervous system ever evolved for creative purposes.

Climate Change

But what of that other facilitating factor I mentioned before, the one that would allow psychedelic use to become important and not just an infrequent and disorienting event for single individuals who might then expulsed from their group? Some environmental or social situation must have resulted in the frequent use of psychedelics by a significant proportion of the core group, and psychedelic use must then have rapidly become part and parcel of the social structure of the group. There are several possibilities. Here another body of research information on climate change becomes important, for during the proposed period between 60Ka and 200Ka, drastic climatic changes were occurring on a time scale certain to disrupt all life on the planet, especially those advanced forms of life so dependent on social complexity and a diversified diet.

In view of the best estimates for the time slot for the population bottleneck and mitochondrial Eve (about 133Ka), [32] a particular period of climatic history stands out: the Eemian interglacial period. During the Eemian, warm, wet, and tropical conditions extended much further north than at present. The fossil evidence shows that hippopotamuses browsed along the banks of the Thames and the Rhine, while lions and elephants roamed the forests of southern England. Until recently, the Eemian interglacial period was thought to have been a stable climatic period lasting from about 130Ka to 114Ka, when the beginning of the last ice age commenced. Climatic information has been obtained from such methods as analysis of ocean sediment cores, pollen cores from terrestrial sources, and ice cores drilled in such locations as Antarctica and Greenland. A recent ice core analysis from Greenland however, has given us a radically new view of the Eemain climatic era, indicating that it was not a period of stability but rather one of wild climatic oscillations:

The early part of the Eemian was dominated by several oscillations between warm and cool stages. The temperature dropped by as much as 10 degrees, sometimes within as short a time as ten to thirty years. Some cold spells lasted a few decades, while others lasted several hundred years. After 8000 years of fluctuating conditions, the climate settled into a period of stable warmth lasting some 2000 years. This warm period ended abruptly...when the temperature in Greenland dropped about 14 °C within ten years. [33]

Such a period as the early Eemain seems to provide exactly the kind of opportunities for the disruption and crisis conditions for groups of human predecessors that would lead to the discovery of psychedelic use. Several times there must have been abrupt changes in habitability of various regions, with changes in flora and fauna and resulting dietary pressures, food shortages, the encroachment of and conflict with neighboring tribes, the possible occurrence of new diseases and a resulting search for medicinal remedies promoting population movements, in essence, frequent turmoil. If modern chimpanzees have the need to roam far and wide to procure their necessary diet including “fungi, rotten wood, insects, bark, shoots,” we may safely assume that proto-man had similar if not even greater exigencies. If uprooted from a home ground, or if rapid climate change forced him to experiment with new foods, an opportunity for the social discovery and use of psychedelic plants becomes important.

In the case of edible fungi today for example, it is well known that many, if not the majority of cases of poisoning result when individuals or groups, newly arrived in an area, see and consume a mushroom which they had always safely consumed in their previous home region. Many mushrooms look nearly identical, and some fungi species are known to be safe in one region, yet toxic in another. A changing climate might well alter a fungal species, changing its visible characteristics or production of metabolites. Some recent work has shown that fungi tend to proliferate at far greater rates in a tropical, CO₂ rich climate, as must have existed during the Eemian. [34] In these facts we see a possible, if not probable mechanism whereby a group of our ancestors might have discovered the use of a psychedelic mushroom or other plant, in which the discovery involved the use of that plant by the entire group, and for an extended period of time. The likelihood of widespread existence of unfamiliar and unusual species of alkaloid-containing plants is, of course, much higher in the tropical and humid, and fluctuating conditions of the Eemian, rather than during the dry, cold, and barren ice age conditions which preceded it. And the dates of the climatic disruptions of the early Eemian that might have led to such a discovery match nicely the mtDNA evidence of a population bottleneck.

The Eemian might well have been the period of mankind’s first important exposure to psychedelic drugs, for by 90Ka we see the appearance of sophisticated bone harpoons and knives in what is now Zaire, a level of technology that was not seen in Europe until 50 thousand years later. [35] But we should not expect that the initial psychedelic exposure would have led to rapid cultural change as we would today define it. Evidence from studies of ‘primitive’ yet ecologically stable and wise tribal societies indicates that psychedelic use and the associated rise of shamanism does not automatically propel a society towards building automobiles and atom bombs, but rather, preferentially enables another kind of creativity involving tradition, stability and equilibrium. Some of the oldest of tribal societies, those that have been discovered in New Guinea, or in the backwaters of the Amazon basin, or the vast tundra of the Siberian wilderness, all have a long tradition of psychedelically influenced shamanism, and have remained stable for many thousands of years. If we should look at such a society and call it ‘primitive,’ their practices being seen as ‘backward’ and ‘ignorant,’ how much more so may such a stable and ecological society view the all-too-obvious happenings and extrapolations of Twentieth Century ‘Civilization’? Our view today of what constitutes ‘progress’ and ‘civilized living’ has practically nothing in common with the views of hundreds, even thousands of societies that have come before, and lasted far longer than our recent experiment in ‘progress’. With a little luck, the remnants of an isolated tribe or two may well survive us.

A psychedelically-enlightened society does not at all produce rampant technological change, just for the sake of change. They do not fly to the moon just because it is there, or to impress and propagandize tribal members with their supposed superiority over a rival tribe in some cold war scenario. A psychedelically-enabled society does, however, make rapid advances of a creative nature in response to real challenges such as climate change, the necessity to emigrate to new regions, the avoidance of disease and a search for new medicines (chimpanzees and even elephants have been shown to intentionally search out and consume effective medicinals as required). But in periods of climatic- and resource-stability the psychedelically-enabled society also exhibits an ecological stability: it has the power and intelligence to make creative changes as it pleases, and chooses consciously to remain in equilibrium with nature. What could be more illustrative of wisdom than this? In times of stability, psychedelically-enabled tribes produce myth, art, they use their creative powers to elaborate tradition, the hallmark of culture; they do not spend their time in petty schemes to conquer nature, or exploit reality, or develop ‘backward’ regions. Perhaps the long term lesson that is taught by the psychedelic experience is that the human animal, having evolved slowly over millions of years, is ill-equipped to handle sudden large advances in technology, which have historically resulted very reliably in mass production of weapons, ecological destruction, genocide, waste, and the collapse of civilizations. Surely there is a better use for creativity than this.

The point here is to give a better view of what a psychedelically enabled tribe, at the advent of the human race, might do with its powers of creativity. If our original African ancestors began the use of psychedelic agents as the first step toward an organized shamanism, only our modern illusions of what constitutes ‘progress’ would predict that such a society, if truly a society of man, would rapidly invent and amass technology. A broader view would predict that what would be amassed by the true Homo sapiens would be techniques of living exhibiting a consciously designed harmony and ecology, leading to long-lasting modes of tribal life changing only slowly with time. Psychedelically enlightened tribes would optimally remain stable for millennia. To restate: Creativity in such a group would involve the creation and preservation of myth and ritual, the gradual perfection of a style of living, the elaboration of tradition, not a headlong rush into exploitation of ‘resources’ and a supposed domination of nature.

Thus our originally psychedelically-enlightened ancestors, the first humans, would have spread slowly and surely from their original home, perhaps in East Africa, and carried with them such traditions of stability and longevity. Only severe challenges to their survival and continuation would result in their use of the creative power to make radical changes in their technology and lifestyle. Before long even a slow migration would have brought descendants of the original core group into the Middle East, as evidenced by fossils of modern humans in Israel dated at 100Ka. [36] We must remember that climatic changes after the end of the Eemian, although following a general tendency toward the next ice age, continued to include occasional but abrupt reversals as is shown by the recent Greenland ice core studies. Migration was likely therefore to have been a sporadic happening, as certain habitats and food sources changed. Considering these tribes’ penchant for stability, intentional migration, just for the sake of migration, was unlikely. The spread of our ancestors would therefore have been slow and occasional, initiated by the occasional climatic upheavals and other environmental challenges such as volcanic eruption, changing food supplies, occurrence and avoidance of diseases, and perhaps the search for new medicines and psychedelic plants. We know from anthropological studies how important are the recommendations of the shamans for decisions taken by tribal elders, and it is thus possible that shamans also greatly influenced decisions of our early ancestors concerning their movements. The shamans’ use and search for psychedelic plants may well have initiated some early migrations.

It is necessary to understand the above described tendencies that would naturally follow our original psychedelic enlightenment to see why modern culture as we know it did not get underway for over 60 thousand years. Tradition and stability reigned for many thousands of years while a slow migration brought human ancestors to Europe, Asia, and finally the Americas. But the flowering of modern culture did not really get underway until 40 thousand years ago, when art and body ornamentation, sophisticated bone tools, built hearths and structured living spaces, open site ‘religious’ burials, storage pits and social storage, quarries, the long distance exchange of raw materials, long term occupation of harsh environments, and signs of complex forward planning made a wide appearance as evidenced in the archaeological record. [37] This apparently sudden appearance of the roots of the modern age, in which the beginnings of modern technology can be seen, is the phenomenon that has challenged anthropologists the most. If anatomically and cognitively modern humans began their specieshood in Africa 130Ka, why did it take so long for the modern trend to get underway? And importantly, what was the catalyst which precipitated this event so suddenly? Like all history, the answers to such questions, even if they could be known, must necessarily be very complex, a story that can be told in a multitude of ways that might seem contradictory. Consider the myriad ways that even recent history can be written.

But some scholars have proposed that the sudden flowering of the modern age beginning about 40Ka might actually have been more gradual, and sporadic. Such ideas fit in with the above observations on the likely characteristics of psychedelically-enlightened societies. The appearance of the previously-mentioned bone harpoons in Zaire, and other scattered evidence may well indicate that local tribes made advances in technology in fits and starts, in response to novel challenges, and then returned to long periods of stability. The appearance of cave art seems today from modern discoveries to be rather abrupt, yet the quality of such art would indicate a long tradition of artistic endeavor, certainly the artists of the Lascaux and Cosquer caves were no amateurs, thousands of years of tradition no doubt led up to their remarkable artistic abilities. New discoveries of even more ancient sites are bound to indicate that the first ‘artists’ did not suddenly appear around 40 thousand years ago, but that artistic expression was a slowly maturing phenomenon of very long duration indeed, going back to the Eemian perhaps.

The psychedelic model of evolution of culture therefore agrees that some recent interpretations of evidence indicating a ‘sudden flowering’ of culture beginning about 40Ka is too drastic. Alison Brooks, an archeologist who with John Yellen made the important finds in Zaire, states:

A closer scrutiny of the archeological record leads one to inquire, Just how abrupt was the behavioral transition in Europe? I believe that the gulf between the Middle Paleolithic and the Upper Paleolithic has been artificially widened by de-emphasizing the very real evidence of cultural complexity in the former and overstressing the achievement of early modern humans, who, in Europe, did not achieve all of the behaviors usually cited as part of the Upper Paleolithic "revolution" until the very end of the Pleistocene [near 10,000 years ago]. [38]

One final surmise about the trigger events that may have continued to push Early Man along the road to modern civilization will bring this chapter to a close. If, according to my theory, there was a gradual evolution of culture during the 70 thousand years between the Eemian and the period in which the beginnings of modern culture are deemed to have begun 40 thousand years ago, then we might look for the rapid, yet sporadic and geographically independent advances in culture and technology to coincide with known instances of rapid climatic change, with instances of severe volcanic activity or other known or to-be-discovered radical environmental influences during the period. It will certainly be interesting to compare further detailed analyses of the new Greenland ice cores to known and future archeological discoveries in an attempt to correlate cultural change with environmental disruption. Perhaps there will never be enough evidence to write history about such pre-historic times, but intriguing clues and parallel developments may well appear that will at least allow the writing of a probable scenario.

The question of how geographically isolated groups of modern men all developed astounding cultural and technological advances, and how at least two dozen different regional societies of men experienced along with such changes a dramatic increase in population, has been a puzzle for many archaeologists, linguists, anthropologists, and other workers. In the words of Chris Stringer and Robin McKie,

It is an extraordinary catalogue of achievements that seem to have come about virtually from nowhere — though obviously they did have a source. The question is: what was it? Did we bring the seeds of this mental revolution with us when we began our African Exodus, though its effects were so subtle they took another 50,000 years to accumulate before snowballing into a cultural and technological avalanche that now threatens to engulf Homo sapiens? Or did that final change occur later, and was it therefore more profound, and much speedier in its effects? [39]

I believe the answer is neither of these, or rather a combination of the two: The seeds of the revolution were indeed carried by Homo sapiens from his birthplace in Africa, but they were seeds which needed periodic stimulation to grow vigorously. As I have argued, psychedelic wisdom does not of itself propel societies to produce a “technological avalanche” nor should we believe that “technological avalanches” are inherently good. Psychedelic wisdom rather leads to ecology, stability, and longevity. But when novel and severe challenges present themselves to psychedelically-enabled societies, they are able to react intelligently and with foresight and complex long-range planning. This is perhaps the most important difference between the true Homo sapiens his animal forebears.

The Long Winter

Thus the periodic and now well-established abrupt climatic upheavals of the post-Eemian world became the catalyst which successively and cumulatively forced tribes of men living in many isolated areas of the globe to use their God-like powers of creativity to advance technology in the interests of survival and stability. An ice age was approaching, with fits and starts, and global climatic change was frequent and severe. If the cognitive seeds existed, dormant in the sense of not automatically producing technological change at a rate which we moderns believe essential to our species, and these seeds existed in all the societies of men around the globe, the fact of climatic change being a global phenomenon would explain how these seeds flowered, or were forced to grow independently in all these regions.

During the post-Eemian period, changes in the earth’s orbit were responsible for the climatic disruption and slow onset of a new ice age. But such orbital changes have sometimes been hypothesized as the catalyst for increased volcanic activity as well. Whatever the cause, at least one extremely severe volcanic eruption occurred during the period leading up to that famous starting date for the beginning of modern technology, and in line with my proposals, may have been a major event pushing tribal societies around the world toward radical changes in the effort to survive. Stringer and McKie tell of the eruption:

The Earth was gripped by continuing climatic mayhem as changes in its orbit began inexorably to push down the world's thermostat. Then to add to these woes, about 74,000 years ago, Mount Toba on the island of Sumatra exploded in the largest volcanic eruption of the past 450 million years. The blast was 4,000 times more powerful than that of Mount St Helens and would have sent more than 1,000 cubic kilometres of dust and ash into the atmosphere, plunging the earth into years-long volcanic winters. Summer temperatures could have dropped by as much as twelve degrees centigrade, while forests shrank, deserts spread, and in eastern Asia, a prolonged winter monsoon would have swept clouds of dust from inland deserts round the globe... Having evolved in warm Savannah sun we nearly perished, huddled in cold dismal misery as volcanic plumes straddled the earth. [40]

Examination of some recent charts of sea-levels and estimated prevailing temperatures reveals that this event seems to have brought on the most severe period of the last ice age. The post-Eemian climate between 115Ka to 75Ka is now known to be more changeable, the Greenland ice core data showing several abrupt reversals, yet the same data show that after a significant warming period peaking about 75Ka to 80Ka, a severe decline then led into the very coldest period of the ice age. The whole of the post-Eemian climatic turmoil may well have been the partner to those original African seeds of modern culture which required such periodic stimulation to grow. The volcanic eruption might have been one of the most important instances driving societies to improvise and find technological solutions in order to survive, the aftermath of the Mount Toba event would have disrupted flora and fauna world-wide, it would have caused food shortages, driven intentional and planned migration in search of resources, brought about wide experimentation with new foods and medicinal plants, and perhaps even led to the appearance of new or altered species of psychedelic plants such as the fungi which might have proliferated in the wake of widespread forest death and an abundance of decaying vegetation. Psilocybe cyanescens for example, usually a fairly rare species, thrives in decaying woody debris and in colder climes. It is also one of the more powerful Psilocybe species.

Since all the previous climatic changes of the Eemian were fairly gradual, taking at a minimum several years or centuries to develop, it becomes difficult to choose a specific one as a candidate for the ‘trigger’ event leading to social psychoactive use. But in the Toba eruption and succeeding volcanic winter, we have an extremely abrupt event that surely caused the kinds of disruption required to change habits overnight. Thus the Toba eruption, although occurring a bit late for other parts of the argument here, might well have been the initial trigger event. This possible scenario does tie in with some further important evidence, however.

Ethiopia

If the Toba eruption is to be our catalytic event, looking for a geographical location where that first psychedelically-enabled tribe might have evolved would lead us to the Abyssinian highlands of Ethiopia, a possible area of refuge and retreat for our original ancestors who were previously living in the Herto region, a lowland coastal region to the east. A recent BBC report places the earliest yet discovered anatomically-modern humans there: a 160,000 year-old fossil find shows that modern, yet still proto-human beings existed there in a state of pre-human stasis for a very long time indeed. The Highlands to the west of the Herto were a place where they might have escaped the drought and starvation the Toba eruption must have produced. It is of course impossible to say what psychedelic plants might have existed there at the time, with the radical climate disruption ongoing.

It is certainly a difficult task to sift and weigh all these factors in the attempt to propose a concise scenario for psychedelic influence on early man. Two or more seemingly contradictory scenarios might well have happened simultaneously in different regions, or consecutively. The idea of psychedelic evolution is still too new, and much more work will have to take place with these new hypotheses in mind, trying to prove and disprove the many resulting implications before we can decide on a likely scenario. As I have said, this task is more than just the construction of a temporary model, it is an attempt to discover actual history and subject to real error.

NOTES & REFERENCES FOR PARTS 1 & 2

Balick & Cox, Plants, People, and Culture — The Science of Ethnobotany, Scientific American Library 1996, pp156-157

Brown, Donald E., Human Universals, Temple University Press, 1991, p.6

Samorini, Animals and Psychedelics — The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness, Park Street Press 2002 (from the foreword by Rob Montgomery). Originally published in Italian under the title Animali che si drogano by Telesterion Vicenza.

Machiavellian Intelligence, Richard W. Byrne and Andrew Whiten, editors, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1988.

ibid., chapter 20, “Tools and the evolution of human intelligence,” Thomas Wynn, p 283.

ibid., Alison Jolly, pp373-4.

See for example the paper by Daniel C. Dennett, “The intentional stance in theory and practice” for an appreciation of the “levels of intentionality” necessary and implicit in social interaction, ibid., chapter 14, pp180-202.

McKenna, Terence, Food of the Gods,

Manuscript in preparation.

Ibid., A ‘habit routine’ in my analysis could be initially defined as a nested set of habitual-but-variable responses to a situation, physiological in some instances as when an approaching tennis ball activates a largely automatic, pre-learned and practised yet variable set of physical actions in a ‘return of volley’. More importantly here are the habit routines concerning the thinking processes that are used to arrive at an evaluation and conclusion about a situation. Established ideas, conditioned attitudes, prejudices, etc., predominate and shape how we routinely and normally arrive at our view of a situation, and it requires a far more active, creative, intentional and analytical effort on our part to come to a view that may be at odds with our habitual ways. Howard Margolis, a student of Thomas Kuhn, has written two admirable books concerning ‘habits of mind’ and how they govern perception, judgment, and even scientific beliefs. See Patterns, Thinking and Cognition, 1987, and Paradigms and Barriers, How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs, 1993, both University of Chicago Press.

Sober, Elliott and Wilson, David Sloan, Unto Others, Harvard University Press 1998.

See Toward a Science of Consciousness, Hameroff, Kaszniak, and Scott, editors, The M.I.T. Press, 1996, p687

The Thinking Ape, Richard Byrne, Oxford University Press 1995, p178.

ibid., p142.

Katherine Milton, “Foraging behavior and the evolution of primate intelligence”, in Machiavellian Intelligence, ibid., pp285-305.

Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck, The Road to Eleusis, Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, North Atlantic Books, 2008

See for example African Exodus, Chris Stringer & Robin McKie, Jonathan Cape, London 1996, p92-93

Self-Made Man, Jonathan Kingdon, John Wiley & Sons 1993, p97

Steven Pinker, “Facts about human language relevant to its evolution” in Origins of the Human Brain, Jean-Pierre Changeux and Jean Chavaillon, editors, A Fyssen Foundation Symposium, Clarendon Press, Oxford, ch17.

ibid., p271.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn

The Multiregional Hypothesis posits that an early migration by Homo erectus from the African heartland to the Near East, Europe, Asia, Australia, was followed by a long period of regional and parallel development, with some intermixing between regions, to produce Homo sapiens quasi-independently in the various regions. Under this scenario, racial differences, long thought to be far more significant than has recently been shown to be the case by genetic analyisis, were supposedly evolved during this at least million-year period.

The first ‘Out-of-Africa’ migration being that of H. erectus 1.5 to 2 Ma.

African Exodus, Chris Stringer and Robin McKie, Jonathan Cape, London 1996, from the Preface.

“Mitochondrial DNA and Human Evolution” in Origins of the Human Brain, Jean-Pierre Changeux and Jean Chavillon, editors, Fyssen Foundation Symposium, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995, p 128.

African Exodus, op. cit., p150

Ibid., p 150

The Origin of Modern Humans, Roger Lewin, Scientific American Library 1993, p99.

See for example: Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man, and Richard Klein, The Human Career.

African Exodus, op. cit., pp 5-6

Ibid., p134.

see The Origin of Modern Humans, op. cit., p99.

“Chill Warnings from Greenland,” New Scientist, 28 August, 1993, pp29-33.

“Sneezing while the Earth warms,” New Scientist, 24 August, 1996, p5.

African Exodus, op. cit, p5.

see African Exodus, op. cit, various index entries under “Qafzeh, Israel.”

see the chart in In Search of the Neanderthals, Christopher Stringer and Clive Gamble, Thames and Hudson, 1993, p198.

Quoted in Lewin, The Origin of Modern Humans, op. cit., p128

African Exodus, op. cit., p186-187

African Exodus, op. cit., p153. Stringer and McKie give the reference for the eruption as M. Rampino and S. Self, 1993, “Climate-volcanism feedback and the Toba eruption of ca. 74,000 years ago”, Quatenary Research, 40: 269-80.

Final Comment

If in fact we are products of a psychedelic awakening, and the change is truly evolutionary, what would that signify? Animals, plants too, but especially advanced animals change slowly and evolutionary developments require lengthy time periods for incorporation. A psychedelic awakening implies a very rapid evolutionary change, one that our species was ‘not ready’ to experience. Net: the change can only be beneficial with continued psychedelic training so that the change can be correctly assimilated in each succeeding generation. Without that training, the more power we have as individuals and collectively, the more we will unfailingly use that power in destructive ways, i.e., ways not in the best interests of long term prosperity and equilibrium with Gaia, not to mention survival.

1. See for example “Doubt over 'volcanic winter' after Toba super-eruption”, May 1, 2013, Oxford University and “Evidence suggests Toba volcanic winter was less lethal than thought” March 2018. Yet we have the much more recent eruptions of Samalas and Tambora described at Wikipedia, both in Indonesia and both of which did cause serious climatic disruption, even in far-away Europe and North America, with reliably documented agricultural failures, epidemics, famine... So it remains for me still entirely possible that Toba did cause crisis conditions in E. Africa, as I suggested above. I have duplicated these website articles at http://www.psychedelic-library.org/Kosmos in case they should be removed from their original locations.

2. Stringer, Chris: "Why we are not all multiregionalists now" Trends in Ecology & Evolution Volume 29, ISSUE 5, April 2014

3. Wasson, R. Gordon. The Road to Eleusis chapter 1.