WHAT IS TERRENCE MCKENNA'S STONED APE THEORY?
The fact that humans use mind-altering substances is quite extraordinary and especially that we have been doing so for thousands of years. Terrence McKenna wrote a book about it and argued that the use of such substances initiated and underpinned the development of our brains. The question is whether this is really so. Scientists disagree. In this blog, we look at exactly what the theory means.
Food of the Gods and the Stoned Ape Theory
Terrence McKenna was a well-known ethnobiologist, psychonaut and mycologist. He wrote his best-known book Food of the Gods in 1992. In it, he explores man's fascination with substances that can alter consciousness and his unique use of psychoactive plants and fungi. He claimed that hallucinogens played a major role in the evolution of Homo sapiens. This is referred to as the Stoned Ape Theory. This theory is still groundbreaking. Not because it has been fully accepted by other scientists, but because the idea is simply fascinating and turns our perception of our origins on its head.
The main background to the theory is the fact that we actually don't really know why Homo sapiens' brain grew so explosively over a period of 3 million years. After all, our brain changed from the size of a 350-gram watermelon to a large pumpkin weighing almost 1.5 kilos. That is four times as much and in a much shorter time than it had taken our ancestors to get to those 350 grams. McKenna believed that this huge growth was partly caused by the ingestion of psilocybin mushrooms.
Homo sapiens on a journey
Nor was it the case that Home sapiens ate magic mushrooms once in a while. In the Pleistocene, humans probably ate these mind-altering mushrooms regularly. This period lasted from 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago. There was desertification on the African continent. Our ancestors were forced to travel to richer feeding grounds. They left tropical forests in search of food. They probably chased herds of cows and other herbivores and ate the flies that are always around these animals.
Where there are cows, there is cow poo, and so Homo sapiens will also have come into contact with Psilocybe cubensis. This mushroom does love a nice cow poo. Even today, it is the most common mushroom in the world. But imagine, you are in a new country where there is all this food that you are not familiar with. Chances are, Homo sapiens were experimenting with unfamiliar fruits, nuts and mushrooms. They were hungry anyway and then you try something. So did a magic mushroom.
That's what McKenna thought too, but he went a step further for Stoned Ape Theory. An experienced psychonaut himself, he assumed that these new consciousness-altering experiences for Homo sapiens laid the foundation for our current civilisation. Of course, these early humans could not dose carefully. They simply ate one or more magic mushrooms. These different doses helped humans form new insights and ideas.
Stoned Ape Theory: The influence of magic mushrooms on human development
When you eat magic mushrooms, it affects your perception and how you think. People in prehistoric times will have noticed this too. At low doses, psilocybin can sharpen the senses. Possibly they could see better and it helped them to be better hunters. This in turn allowed people to reproduce faster.
Higher doses lead to a violent trip. You can have a transcendental experience and enter higher realms. For our ancestors, this may have led to a desire for depth, for contact with a God or Goddess. They probably wanted to get explanations for unknown, enigmatic and frightening phenomena. Mushrooms may well have been the impetus for the development of religions. A trip also often results in people feeling more connected to each other, which may also lead to more sexual bonds among themselves. This encourages genetic diversity.
A high dose also promotes communication between parts of the brain that are not normally in contact with each other. This can cause synesthesia, where the senses merge. But it also creates new connections, new thoughts and new insights. Terrence's brother Dennis explains: "You can't just say that our ancestors ate magic mushrooms (could have been truffles) and that this caused our brains to mutate. It's much more complex than that. But it certainly played a role. You can think of magic mushrooms as a piece of software that programmed our neurological hardware to think differently, to be conscious and to start using language."
What is the significance of McKenna's theory?
Not everyone accepts Stoned Ape Theory, and they don't need to. It is a tantalising and challenging hypothesis that may link our evolution with psychedelics. Not many scientists take the theory seriously. In itself, this is understandable, because McKenna's view does have an important flaw: Evolution is, of course, an incredibly complex process. Many factors come into play. To say that there is only one factor that caused a giant leap in our evolution(human consciousness) is perhaps somewhat implausible.
But one of the proponents is Paul Stamets, scientist and mycologist. He points out that it is important to face the fact that 200,000 years ago there was a sudden doubling in the size of the human brain. From an evolutionary point of view, that is truly extraordinary. And there is in fact no explanation for this phenomenon. Is the use of psychedelics the only answer? Probably not. But it is not strange to think that the miraculous properties of magic mushrooms did play a role in our evolution.
