Psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics could be the reason humans mentally evolved and started questioning the...

Kek

>could

Big word, completely meaningless conjecture is always started with "could", "if", "maybe" and so on.

Increasing social clan ties.

Anatomical humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, yet civilization is only maybe 10 thousand years.

It's the stoned ape theory, and shouldn't be dismissed, psylocybin mushrooms exist on every continent. it's probably not very likely, though.

we should experiment by getting dolphins, monkeys, and octopus high on shrooms. Seriously, i wanna see an octopus trip out. For science, of course.

>Increasing social clan ties.
how did they start though? Also just big words.

Cooking the meat makes so that less energy is used in the stomach to digest and hence more sugar to think

Stoned ape hypothesis was literally made up by Terrance McKenna while he was high and the only civilization known to ingest psychedelics with any regularity were the Mayans and Aztecs, who also ripped out the hearts of prisoners. Rather flying in the face of his ideas that psychedelics bring about non-violence and social harmony.

The biggest problem however, is there is no known mechanism by which psychedelic drugs could affect DNA.

Well from that I can attain that you know nothing of mayan culture or any other cultures.
I recommend you read a book sometime.

Ah, I forgot to add something.
You fucking cock gobbling shit stain.
Go kill yourself you autistic shit talker.

This is a good way of putting it.

Go ahead and tell me my misconception. They had a pantheon of Gods that required regular human sacrifice or the star people would descend and kill everyone. The prisoners themselves often thought it was an honor but it's still ritual, bloody human sacrifice. In addition, the mesoamerican cultures were just as warlike as any other. They didn't reach some zen tranquility thanks to the aid of mushrooms.

>the only civilization known to ingest psychedelics with any regularity were the Mayans and Aztecs, who also ripped out the hearts of prisoners
jesus christ could you be any more wrong lol

>The biggest problem however, is there is no known mechanism by which psychedelic drugs could affect DNA.
they don't have to directly affect DNA, merely induce epigenetic changes that are evolutionarily advantageous and let natural selection replace the entire hominid population with 'smart conscious' apes

>jesus christ could you be any more wrong lol

You have a counter-example? The only thing I've ever found has been a cave in north africa with a painting of a mushroom.

"Aztecs and Mayans" was too narrow since psychedelics were also used further south and north but you get the point.

>Go ahead and tell me my misconception
Well first of all you randomly decided to declare that no other civilizations used psychedelics when there is evidence of psychedelic use in many different ancient and even up to medieval cultures around the world, this is well documented historical fact, you'd know this if you weren't completely ignorant of what you're talking about.

> They had a pantheon of Gods that required regular human sacrifice or the star people would descend and kill everyone. The prisoners themselves often thought it was an honor but it's still ritual, bloody human sacrifice.
Those are the Aztecs.

You are thinking of the Aztecs.

The Mayans are not the Aztecs.

The Mayans did not practice mass human sacrifice. The Mayans were a highly developed culture with advanced knowledge of astronomy. They developed a calendar accurate to the year 2012 and their civilization disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

The Aztecs were a warrior culture who emerged several hundred years later, rose to power by brutally conquering the tribes who stood against them, and perpetrated mass human sacrifice in an attempt to prevent the prophesied end of their world. They were not the Mayans, they lived in a mainly different area, spoke a different language, practiced a different culture and worshipped different gods.

>In addition, the mesoamerican cultures were just as warlike as any other. They didn't reach some zen tranquility thanks to the aid of mushrooms.
The point of the stoned ape theory is that ALL civilization started by hominid apes ingesting psychedelics, developing independent consciousness, language and basic social organization, and from there growing into civil society. Not whatever the fuck you think it is.

>use in many different ancient and even up to medieval cultures around the world
Where? I haven't found reference to any widespread use of psychedelics besides native Americans.

>Those are the Aztecs.

You are wrong on this and I know the timeframing of mesoamerica. The Mayans also believed their Gods required human blood as nourishment and used similar methods of decapitation and human heart extraction.

>You have a counter-example?
just to give a few:
the Sami people of northern Scandinavia used Amanita Muscaria mushrooms in religious rituals, a shaman would eat the mushrooms then people would drink his urine which contained psychedelic compounds
The Greeks were known to use ergot-based extracts, the active ingredient in these being LSA, a precursor to LSD
The Assassins, a medieval warrior cult of west-central Asia, used hashish as part of their rituals for training new initiates
The use of cannabis extracts, most often in the form of an edible mixture known as bhang, has been documented for literally thousands of years in India

This is just, like, a handful of examples of commonly known general knowledge, you don't seem to be the type to think critically, but if you look at this evidence, and consider the facts that little documentation of most ancient cultures survives, primitive religious rites were generally kept secret and preserved through oral tradition, and ancient medicine involved the extensive use of plants and herbs, it seems much more likely than not that psychedelic use was widespread across even many ancient cultures which are well documented in the modern day.

>You are wrong on this and I know the timeframing of mesoamerica.
You're grossly misrepresenting Mayan culture then.

Sure, the Mayans weren't just a bunch of peace-loving hippies but they were not a primarily warlike culture, they achieved a level of social harmony above most civilizations of the time, and had scientific advances beyond those of Europe in some fields. They practiced ritual sacrifice but it was an honor-based system and not a primary driver for war.

The Aztecs, in contrast were a war-based culture who enslaved all the nearby tribes, sacrificed all their prisoners and had to go out and conquer more tribes to get more prisoners to sacrifice to the gods in their insane death-cult.

My point being, the Mayans had an advanced, stable, civil society, you're trying to portray them as a bunch of bloodthirsty savages like the Aztecs which is an ignorant racist caricature.

...also, I can tell you're not intelligent enough to appreciate this point, but it's worth noting that the Aztecs did indeed see their entire culture and way of life destroyed through plague and the Spanish conquest, the prophesies of doom came to fruition and all their blood sacrifice wasn't enough.

>My point being, the Mayans had an advanced, stable, civil society, you're trying to portray them as a bunch of bloodthirsty savages

That wasn't really my intention. I know the accomplishments of their culture. But you are also guilty of misrepresenting them in some respects. For instance, the idea that human sacrifice wasn't a driver of war in the Mayan empire is going against the opinion of scholars in the area and the idea that they were anymore peaceful than various empires of the period is new to me. My point was not that the Mayans were primitive savages, just that they were human, and the use of psychedelics didn't seem to altar their drive for war or conquest in any significant way.

>...also, I can tell you're not intelligent enough to appreciate this point

Wow you fucking blew my mind with that one dude.

I doubt it. Psychedelics evolved as a deterrent in nature; you aren't supposed to enjoy the feeling.

I question the "higher thinking" abilities of psychedelics, anyhow. Most of the CIA experiments on LSD yielded terror and discombobulation. Nowhere was there any talk of "enlightenment" until Alfred Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass and a multitude of musicians and other entertainers took the hippy movement (and the Beatniks to some extent prior to them) mainstream.

Basically, LSD and other psychedelics interfere with your information processing. There are dense serotonin receptors in your occipital lobe that psychedelics bind to, which is where your brain makes sense of a lot of incoming sensory input. Your brain processes things the way it does for a reason, both for efficiency's sake and for survival reasons. A failure to identify a threat quick enough, for instance, could kill the individual. You are supposed to find the information scrambling unpleasant. Any "enlightenment" you get out of it is your own subjective experience, and probably not very founded in reality.

>Nowhere was there any talk of "enlightenment" until Alfred Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass and a multitude of musicians and other entertainers took the hippy movement (and the Beatniks to some extent prior to them) mainstream.

The use of entheogens to induce religious ecstasy has existed for thousands of years in human history and is often accompanied by a special priest class or shaman consecrating the experience as divine. The hippies were by no means the first culture to tap into the spiritual aspect of this but rather a modern revitalization of the practice more than anything.