Hominin encounters with macroscopic fungi growing on the soil surface must constitute a very ancient and continual phenomenon that demanded behavioral adaptations. Fungi are widely distributed across ecozones and comprise not only valuable foods and medicines, but also highly toxic and even quickly fatal Buy shrooms online substances. Sporocarps (fungal fruitbodies) are much more abundant in the forest understory than in the middle and upper canopies where most primate species tend to live (Hanson et al., 2003).

Once our hominin ancestors habitually foraged on the floors of forests and in meadows, especially in tropical areas, they recurrently encountered mushrooms. By necessity, they experimented with mycophagy and found out which species could be safely eaten as food or carefully exploited as medicine. Likewise, when psilocybin containing fungi were consumed in large enough quantities they caused dramatic alterations in perception and consciousness, drawing attention to their properties and their positive and negative effects on well-being.

As a consequence, memories (and eventually cultural traditions) were formed regarding the identification of these species and the resulting effects of their ingestion. As has been hypothesized for non-human primate self-medicative behaviors (see Huffman, 1997), traditions of medicinal use of psychedelic mushrooms may have started as a result of ill, hungry hominins trying new foods during periods of extreme food scarcity, and upon recovery, associating their improved health with the new dietary item. Subsequently, local enhancement (i.e., naïve individuals having their attention drawn to species used by others) and social learning could have played a role in spreading the behavior though the group.




While incontrovertible direct evidence of psychedelic mushroom ingestion by ancient humans (e.g., dental calculus containing psilocybin mushroom tissue or spores) is lacking, there is direct evidence of the ingestion of edible mushrooms (O’Regan et al., 2016) and medicinal plants (Hardy et al., 2013) derived from analysis of dental calculus recovered from remains of humans from the Upper Paleolithic.

There are 22 primate species known to eat fungi (Hanson et al., 2003), and African great apes, in particular, are known to ingest a variety of non-nutritional plants to “treat” homeostatic challenges [e.g., to aid in the control of intestinal parasites and/or provide relief from related gastrointestinal upset (Huffman, 1997)].

It thus seems highly unlikely that our hominin ancestors ignored the widespread coprophilic species of psilocybin containing mushrooms conspicuously growing on ungulates’ dung (e.g., the pantropical Psilocybe cubensis), especially since Plio-Pleistocene hominin activities of scavenging, hunting, and eventually domestication of bovines placed this psychedelic within the sphere of daily activities (see van Ginneken et al., 2017for evidence and discussion regarding the similarity of migration routes of early bovines and early hominins and its implications for understanding our ancestors’ pan-African dispersal).

As will be shown below, the likelihood of Buy shrooms online intentional and repeated use of psilocybin is supported by its low toxicity and by its close resemblance to the neurotransmitter serotonin, which opened up the possibility for its exploitation as a “treatment” for a significant homeostatic challenge recurrent in a socio-cognitive niche – serotonin depletion.