Stoned Ape Theory
Continuing from our last outing into foraging, we’re going to talk a little about mushrooms today.
That seems a bit predictable for Sam’s Good Stuff you say, but wait - there’s a twist; we’re going to be talking about mushrooms from 2.5 billion years ago.
Initially that is. Then we will move to mushrooms from two million years ago, and then 10,000 years ago and we will end with mushrooms in the present day.
Capiche?
Molto bene.
My urge to explore this all with you comes from having watched Fantastic Fungi last week on Netflix. What I imagined would be an enlightening biological explanation of all fings fungi in fact ended up being a long advocation for magic mushroom use in both medicinal and personal contexts, from microdosing to having full blown trips. A quite successful campaign I’ll add as I would now quite like some, and if anyone knows how to get some, can they message me back privately.
But before we get to the mushroom’s magic, we must first explore its origins. The earliest dating fungal fossils have recently been found with an age of 2.4 billion years. Comparatively humans (homo sapiens) have been around a measly 200,000 years, meaning if fungi’s entire existence up to today had been spent singing Bohemian Rhapsody then we would only have existed for a fraction of the last note. This makes fungi our elders; ancient creatures that cried mammmmaaa in a climate that lacked even oxygen, shouted Galileo! Galileo! as a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs and pleaded to get right out of here through the Pleistocene ice age.
The fossils found were those of fungal mycelium. What we commonly recognise as mushrooms are only often the cap of the mushberg; the reproductive organs of much larger masses of hyphae (sort of strands of fungal cells) that stretch underground in vast networks. Not only does fungi’s ancestry reach far beyond our own, but some of these mycelial networks are suspected to be the longest living organisms on Earth with an estimated age between 2000 and 8500 years old.
And more than being ancient, these mycelium are even…
Conscious…
Or so I’ve been told.
Suspend your disbelief. This is the command I have heard so often in my recent exploration of all things mad and mushroom that I fear I may have entered such a permanent state of suspended disbelief as to require extra caution in avoiding Jehova’s witnesses and Scientology outlets. However I must ask of you to do the same as we explore some thought-provoking ideas.
Let’s put forward that consciousness is the resultant phenomena of highly coordinated electrical signals passing through a huge network of junctions. In the brain, the material action of cells passing electric charge across synapses creates the immaterial sensation of perception (your experience of reading this page right now). If we believe that we can create artificial intelligence through similar processes played out on chips (electronic, not potato), then the reasoning goes why could this not be happening in mycelium whose hyphae transmit electric signals and whose synapses number orders of magnitude higher than our own?
This has led to the Wood Wide Web theory, where mycelium are proposed to consciously arbiter the exchange of resources and information among trees beneath the forest floor. A parent tree may support its progeny by providing nutrients to the mycelium, which passes it on to the roots of the child tree (while of course not forgetting to take a cut).
So when the animal kingdom first split from its fungal ancestry some 650 million years ago, this could have marked a huge regression in intelligence. It would take further hundreds of millions of years for animalia to find sentience again and similar lengths of time again for one particular species of primates to find higher consciousness.
The deep fungal theorists have it that this journey where humans rediscover intelligence also has mushrooms at his heart. Disbelief still suspended? Good, then you are ready for stoned ape theory.
Sometime between two million and two hundred thousand years ago there was an inexplicable doubling in brain size of our ancestors. I am assured by evolutionary biologists on YouTube that two million years is in fact nothing and that such a profound change could occur within this blink of an eye is something of a biological miracle.
Consuming meat and the advent of cooking have been posited as the explanation, however another element of our diet has been long since overlooked. In order to hunt prey, humans would have traced their dung, and it turns out that what grows prolifically in herd dung in the Savannah is fungal caps high in psilocybin content (AKA magic mushrooms). Our omnivore primate ancestors, already familiar with eating mushrooms, tired and hungry from their long pursuits, at one point would have taken the plunge and tucked in.
The most noted effect of psilocybin is synesthesia of the senses; you begin to hear sights and see sounds. The advent of language, the distinguishing feature of humanity, could be understood as a form of synesthesia where mental concepts are imposed upon physical acts like gestures of the hand and grunts of the throat. When I watch my baby not respond to my pointing, I am often reminded of the layers of abstraction lying behind the seemingly obvious equation of a point (i.e. the particular shaping of a hand) with a command.
The idea is not that apes tripping on mushrooms suddenly sprung into deep philosophical discourse, but that this consumption happened millions upon millions of times, leaving incremental, inheritable and slowly layering developments in our consciousness. The mechanism by which this occurs is epigenetic neurogenesis, a process with a title lofty enough to let us question it no further.
A more intuitive analogy puts this interaction between humans and shrooms as the brain providing the hardware, while the psilocybin arrived to act as the vital software. It’s the kind of analogy that if asked to expand on starts to fall apart quite quickly, but it sounds good at initial hearing; you know like hardware and software right? A computer innit.
Time passes and we arrive at 10,000 years ago and humans are officially full blown stoners. There are cave paintings everywhere, and some are found to contain totally trippy characters filled in with geometric patterns and that are literally covered in mushrooms.
Yet also around this period humans start to become civilised, and over the coming millennia we will slowly lose our connection with nature, fungi and their spells that supposedly granted our unique perception. We eventually reach today, a time so disconnected with our fungal roots (or hyphae) that the consumption of magic mushrooms is even illegal (though many medicinal experiments may be on the cusp of changing that status) and drawings as the above are confined to the pages of comic books.
The fungus we are most acquainted with is now the button mushroom, reliably stocked at big and small supermarkets on any road in the country. They come as neat carbon copies of one another, mere shades of their wild relatives, but this loss of character is the necessary price paid for convenience and availability.
There’s a sadness in coming straight out of my internet rabbit-hole of ancient and conscious fungi to open a fridge door containing Tesco’s white button mushrooms. I can’t help but compare them to the giant boletus of the ancient forest floor, and then in turn compare the shamen covered in shrooms to myself strapped to the desk.
Yet I also feel it should not all be taken for granted, as the hippies may put it; it’s part of a process bigger than ourselves man. The magic mushrooms that may have sparked language, the language that led to writing, the writing that brought science, the science that engineered edible mushrooms en masse and sent them to each corner of the world. A once hungry ape that paved the way for today’s less hungry man.
And these supermarket mushrooms still may be elevated into something worth savouring, as long as we make use of a little of that human ingenuity, apply the abstract notion of care, and ground it all with the correct quantity of garlic, pepper and parsley.
Fried Supermarket Mushrooms
Ingredients
200g mushrooms
2 nobs of butter (or a few tablespoons extra virgin olive oil)
1 small garlic clove, finely chopped
A little parsley, chopped
Salt and pepper
Tricks (/application of ingenuity)
The key with fried mushrooms is that the heat must be very high, the mushrooms not wet, and they must be able to fit in a single layer in the pan while you refrain from stirring them.
If the above is followed, you will end up with beautiful, coloured mushrooms with that pleasing contrast of texture between exterior and interior.
The final trick is then that the mushrooms are cooked in little fat, but then an additional round of fat is applied at the end with the garlic and herb to give it all a glossy coat.
Method
Chop the mushrooms in half (or if particularly large - quarters), these bigger shapes that respect the original form will hold up best in the heat and look most appealing. Put your finest skillet on highest heat and immediately add one nob of butter or a tablespoon or two of olive oil. Once the butter melts (or oil is warmed, but not smoking hot) add the mushrooms and stir once, then leave them for a few minutes until they have coloured (you can lift them up to check now and again how they are getting on, but do not stir).
Turn them over, and let colour again. It will happen quicker this time. When the mushrooms are cooked, push the mushrooms all to one side of the pan and add the second nob of butter (or another two tablespoons of olive oil) to the other side, adorning the garlic and parsley into the little pool of fat and letting them cook together the briefest of moments (five seconds or so), take the pan off the heat, mix the scented fat and mushrooms all together, salt and pepper it all cautiously and immediately serve on some toast that you will have already prepared.
A fried egg on top also does of course not go amiss.
In your elision of subtle ideas, presented with clarity and resisting sensationalism, laced with humour and a gentle wonder that the ordinary may contain the sublime, I see (as I did not before) that science and food writing are close cousins (in the hands of a master).