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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. (26)
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
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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 discovery 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. (27) 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. (28) But
we should not expect that the initial psychedelic exposure
would have led to rapid cultural change as we would today
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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 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 impressand 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
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]