Posted on 04/05/2020 12:27:49 PM PDT by wildbill
EVeryone knows the standard explanation of evolution but the rapid jump from Homo Erectus to Homo Sapiens has no satisfactory answers.
A more radical interpretation of these events involves the same animals, dung, and plants but also includes psychedelic drugs. In 1992, ethnobotanist and psychedelics advocate Terence McKenna argued in the book Food of the Gods that what enabled Homo erectus to evolve into Homo sapiens was its encounter with magic mushrooms and psilocybin, the psychedelic compound within them, on that evolutionary journey. He called this the Stoned Ape Hypothesis.
McKenna posited that psilocybin caused the primitive brains information-processing capabilities to rapidly reorganize, which in turn kick-started the rapid evolution of cognition that led to the early art, language, and technology written in Homo sapiens archeological record. As early humans, he said we ate our way to higher consciousness by consuming these mushrooms, which, he hypothesized, grew out of animal manure. Psilocybin, he said, brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.
As human cultural evolution led to the domestication of wild cattle, humans began to spend a lot more time around cattle dung, McKenna explained. And, because psilocybin mushrooms commonly grow in cow droppings, the human-mushroom interspecies codependency was enhanced and deepened. It was at this time that religious ritual, calendar making, and natural magic came into their own.
(Excerpt) Read more at inverse.com ...
Lamarckism. Changing the way adults think doesn’t change their DNA, and isn’t passed down to their children.
I watched that Pink Floyd movie just once. I was sane and sober. It made no sense to me.
I had one really eerie experience with Pink Floyd. Back in the mid 2000s, I was walking down a rail trail in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa area.
Now this rail trail went miles and miles through corn fields and you could really get far away from civilization. So on one of those days, I'm listening to Pink Floyd music on my iPod and during one of the songs, I heard these sirens. I remember thinking that I never remembered sirens in that particular PF song, though it is not unusual to have weird sound effects in their music.
Turned out it was the TORNADO sirens going off! I took out my earphones and realized that's what those sounds were. I looked behind me and saw this incredibly dark purplish cloud bearing down on me. Right out of Wizard of Oz!
I was more than two miles from my car at the time.
A cool breeze suddenly materialized with patters of the largest rain drops I ever saw. I thought for sure I was in serious trouble. But the heaviest of those clouds passed on to the left of me and all I got was a little wet. Later on I found out a tornado touched down maybe 5 miles from where I was walking. The corn was hardest hit, fortunately.
The average brain size of Homo erectus is estimated to have been roughly 900 cubic centimeters.
The average cranial capacity of Homo sapiens is roughly 1300 cubic centimeters.
How the hell did psychedelics make the brain “grow” 400 CCs?
The brain got bigger because somebody got a high protein food source. I’m thinking close to a shore with abundant shell fish, sea birds and sea mammals.
The increase in brain size had serious implications to human life.
Babies had to be born with larger brains and more pain—and possibly death—for mothers.
Childhood would have to last longer with bigger, growing brains and unfused skull bones.
Longer childhood means more time devoted to watching over and raising children, as they were probably very vulnerable to predation for many years.
There has to be a payoff for all these physical changes.
The big brains led to a more successful life of food and leisure (such as drugs and alcohol), not the other way around.
Son of Sam's dog did tell him to kill people... No evidence that I know of that the dog was eating mushrooms, however.
For the record I said “about the largest”.
AB: “The brain got bigger because somebody got a high protein food source. Im thinking close to a shore with abundant shell fish, sea birds and sea mammals.”
Not to worry....Ms. Sloat has already covered that in this item. Brain power in Neandethal came from fishing ...
https://www.inverse.com/science/neanderthals-food-intelligence
No, not quite. I knew the guy, he had a really nice wife but he always seemed to be stoned on something. He died of brain cancer.
Nah, it was fermented berries that done it.
Actually, Neanderthal brains were slightly bigger than Homo Sapiens.
But then, us humans got their genes...
Individually, Europeans and Austral-Asians (who also got Denovisian DNA) have 1-3% Neanderthal DNA, but collectively, scientists have found 60% of the Neanderthal genome in modern humans!
Africans got some other species that has not been identified yet, but might be similar to Neanderthal, or Homo Heidelbergis.
More likely, the stoned ape exhibited a Darwin theory on evolution and removed his/her genes from the community pool prior to procreation.
:^)
What sets man apart from the chimp is his immortal soul, which is why they hang out in the jungle and eat bananas and we build skyscrapers and F-22s.
As a Belgian monk once said, paraphrasing, “we are born into the world naked and defenseless, but with our reason we conquer all.”
Yes,an immortal soul *and* biology set us apart.
(HQ) Kenny Rogers & The First Edition - Just Dropped In
Smokey, this isn’t Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
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