Food of the Gods

The book Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna provides a fascinating hypothesis on the origins of human consciousness. McKenna believed that the inclusion of the psilocybin mushroom into our ancestors' diets roughly 100,000 years ago allowed for the evolution of Homo sapiens from Homo erectus due to its extraordinary cerebral effects and its evolutionarily-favorable physical benefits.
== Terence McKenna ==
Terence McKenna was born November 16, 1964 in Paonia, Colorado. From a young age, McKenna had developed a deep appreciation for the natural world. He first became aware of magic mushrooms when he was ten years old and early psychedelic experience in his youth showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing." 
McKenna studied at the University of California, Berkley and decided he wanted to study the shamanic use of psychedelic plants. In 1971, he traveled to the Colombian Amazon with his brother and three friends in search of plants containing dimethyltryptamine (DMT), but instead found fields full of Psilocybe cubensis. Mushrooms became the main focus of McKenna's studies and he developed a method for cultivating them at home using the Amazonian fungal spores. He published a book entitled Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide which sold over 100,000 copies and elevated McKenna to a expert amongst the psychedelic movement.
== Stoned Ape Theory ==
Food of the Gods introduced the radical "Stoned Ape" theory of human evolution. The hypothesis suggests that as more of Africa became a desert, early humans needed to find new food sources and psilocybin mushrooms found in cowpat grew plentiful. At lower doses, the mushrooms would increase sexual arousal and improve visual acuity. Psilocybin improved the hunters' edge detection and allowed them to provide more food for the group and increased sexual activity provided more offspring, benefiting and populating the community.
At higher doses, magic mushrooms would "dissolve boundaries," leading to the mixing of genes and a greater sense of responsibility to the community's offspring. High levels of psilocybin activate the language forming areas of the brain, which could have caused the invention of language and music. Psilocybin also dissolves the ego, which meant communal organizations such as religion were "at the forefront of the tribe's consciousness, simply because of the power and strangeness of the experience itself." Ingesting psilocybin mushrooms benefitted the lifestyle of early humans and possibly was the evolutionary catalyst for the expression of all of human culture.
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