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The Center of the Universe
William S. Moxley
7. Evolution
Drugs will not be brought under control until society
itself changes,
enabling men to use them as primitive man did;
welcoming the visions they provided not as fantasies,
but as intimations of a different, and important, level of
reality. |
Brian Inglis (1) |
EARLY MAN'S RELATIONSHIP with the psychedelic
plants he discovered was a symbiotic one. These plants, which had
long before evolved biochemical mechanisms to produce substances
whose ultimate, if incidental function was not to be realized for
millions of years, suddenly provided the key whereby the very
process of evolution might overcome a most formidable barrier. Homo
sapiens, the (potentially) Wise Man was born, and dozens of
obscure species of fungi, flowering vines, roots, seeds, trees
and cacti, became revered partners with him to produce an
experiment in evolution which would truly be a final experiment:
Either it would eventually succeed in producing an enlightened
world society in which the rule of the Perennial Philosophy
occurred not through force of authority but simple good sense,
enabling humankind to undertake a conscious and deliberately
ecological stewardship of his small corner of the universe, or it
would end in the probable destruction of all advanced life on the
planet. There would be no turning back once the barrier of the
sophiolytic instinct had been breached.
The symbiotic partnership at first enabled a
relatively small population of Early Man to prosper, to migrate
rapidly from his birthplace to all the corners of the earth, to
initiate a veritable explosion of culture wherever he went, and
to displace all more primitive species and races of archaic man,
the descendants of Homo erectus which had migrated out of
Africa eons before. But as the experiment progressed and culture,
technology, and thus power accumulated, repudiation of the
beneficial symbiosis sometimes occurred in the various regions of
early civilization. Unfortunately it is a simple fact that
accumulated power and technology may, with the greatest of ease,
be used with malign intent, and thus be used by the ignorant to
enforce their folly on the wise. Wisdom is by definition
incapable of using force, technological force at least, to
assuage ignorance. Advantageous Ends are simply not obtainable by
Deplorable Means. As the first organized societies grew and
accumulated technology, some inevitably succumbed to the
temptations which occur all too easily to the ignorant, including
the subjugation and eradication of neighbors whose continuing
wisdom threatened their power structures. The catalytic factor
which had made culture and technology possible in the first place
was, again and again, ignored, and one by one, such societies
declined and were extinguished, their achievements to be
forgotten along with their perversions. And so the story
continues.
In the early years of my work, and with the spirit
of the 1960's still fresh, it seemed that it was yet possible to
ameliorate by stages and eventually reverse the destructive
momentum that had been building for centuries in the most modern
and recent, and world-encompassing of civilizations, Western
Civilization (for want of a better term). The Twentieth Century
had provided horrors which were the logical extrapolation and
epitome of many centuries of psychedelic ignorance, and there was
something new: the horrors of the Twentieth Century were in
essence terminal ones for they could no longer be exceeded
without a resulting collapse of the civilization which had
brought them about, and the novelty was that this time, the
collapse would preclude the possibility of picking up the pieces
once the ignorance and stupidity of the powerful had run its
course. But having been born into, and grown up within the best
and the worst that civilization had ever offered, it was natural
to hope that the good could be preserved, the bad at least slowly
corrected, a small group of wise persons begin to re-establish
the ancient symbiosis at first stealthily and cautiously, the
resulting new vision becoming eventually an irresistible
ground-swell. Today I am not so sure.
The scenes of my several attempts to be a modern
shaman for the tribe of Western Man provided contradictory and
paradoxical results. In one sense, I was attempting for the first
time a "scientific" rather than ritual and intuitive
approach to shamanism. The teaching and experience of the
psychedelic state was not to be interpreted, as in previous
societies, in terms of myth and ritual, but in terms of a truly
scientific understanding of the eternal religious questions
concerning origins, destinies, and meanings of the life-process.
This understanding would extend even to the biological processes
of the human nervous system which corresponded to the psychedelic
state of awareness. It seemed possible for the first time to
answer many of the questions for which Early Man could only
compose tales and enact symbolic ritual, it seemed that we might
finally grasp where the Essential Mystery of life lay. We would
be able to see how all the religions, all the ancient
philosophies, were describing a truth with means inadequate to
the task, so that their result was not wrong but merely
incomplete, each description like that of one of the blind men
exploring some local region of that famous elephant. Now for the
first time we seemed to have all the tools necessary to step back
and view the beast all-at-once, and use the former limited
techniques to confirm what we now could take in at a glance.
Another important difference in what modern
"scientific" shamanism was attempting was that the
psychedelic experience had in the past been a factor in human evolution,
whereas now we were attempting to make it an essential part of
our technology, a guide enabling the wise use of that technology.
It was obvious that we could not achieve an evolutionary effect
on such a rapid timescale, we could not expect to recapitulate
the phylogeny of the effects of psychedelic experience on Early
Man with the ontogeny of modern psychedelic research. The new
function of psychedelic experience, although helping the
individual to overcome the disadvantages and limitations of
habit-routine governed existence, just like it had done for Early
Man, was not this time a causative factor in the establishment
of culture and civilization, but would instead have to correct a
psychedelically long-ignorant civilization from the path of
self-destruction. Such an accomplishment had never before been
realized, at least not on the global scale required today.
The intent of this approach was therefore to be
directed not just to the benefit of a local tribe as in former
ages, or even the now global tribe of psychedelic seekers, but at
a corrective experience for the evolutionary life process itself.
It seemed therefore that we were involved with an evolution of
the function of psychedelic experience. If at first the
symbiosis had made possible the great experiment, its role was
now to help confirm the inevitable showdown implicit in such an
experiment: given the awakening of mankind from the slumber of
animal existence, an awakening in which man acquires the creative
ability, the sense of right and wrong, and all the other God-like
attributes, it is inevitable that such a gift will be repudiated,
and man assume for whatever reason that he is self-made, not born
of the primitive elements of the earth nor of his animal
ancestors, a pretense of omnipotence. The result of this great
experiment would thus usher in an age in which humankind in its
entirety would finally live up to its potential, or perish. If
psychedelic ignorance had in the past contributed to the demise
of localized civilizations, this time the fate of the entire
planet, and all life thereupon, was at stake.
Although the energies which I set in motion in this
project I know have reached a great many people, and provided a
catalyst to the more positive of these possibilities, the
scenarios within which I have had to operate never seemed to take
on a continuing spirit of the cooperativeness and enlightened
action that might be expected from a knowledge of the intent of
such a project. The chocolate-covered placebo fiasco was neither
the first nor last of the scenes filled with trivial disputes,
cross-purposes, deceptions and dishonesty, scenes certain to
detract from the business of effective shamanism. Business was,
of course, one of the problems.
Ideally, the enlightening medicine should be free;
to attach an earthly value to a sacrament can only devalue the
meaning of the situation in which it is given. But we
co-conspirators could neither afford to work "for free"
in our society of institutionalized greed euphemistically called
competition, nor could we expect others to do so. And the
prohibitionary restrictions of the late 1960's ensured that
people who wished to spread the knowledge of psychedelic wisdom
would often have to deal with unscrupulous intermediaries who
would as soon deal cocaine or other contraband. Cash flow was the
sacred element for such as these. And paradoxically, the
prospective psychedelic initiate also required that a price be
paid for the potion, so paradigmatic was the principle of all
things having their price in this "capitalistic"
society. The power of shamanism in this mundane world had become
in one way like that of the psychiatrist, the effectiveness of
his treatment having been shown by statistical analysis to be
proportional to the size of his fee!
In attempting a modern shamanism I was also at a
great disadvantage not having the direct contact with tribal
members which had always been an essential feature of the
shamanic art in former societies. Rather than direct guidance,
the instructions that went with the potion had to traverse the
several hand-to-hand transactions between myself and the final
recipient. I also had to assume that public information such as
that in the published works of Huxley, Watts, and the many other
gurus of our time would be studied and employed. In the modern
situation, it was also obvious that there could be no public
pronouncement of the intent of such a project in guiding
societies to a new and ecological direction, although many
authors had suggested as much, at least obliquely. Personally, it
would have been absurd to proclaim that this was my
intention, not least for the danger of intervention by the
enforcers of the unenforceable. Today, having years ago retired
from any active continuation of my former activities, it has
become possible to publish an analysis of the intentions and
particulars of that handful of persons, the modern-day shamans
who were instrumental to the early years of the psychedelic
movement.
It is not hard to understand why, with these
retrospective views now available, that of the various scenes and
collaborations of partners involved in the project, the smaller
and more improvisational efforts were the more successful. The
same seemed to be true of other groups doing similar projects.
Bigness was a certain harbinger of disaster. When big plans were
made, large quantities of psychedelics produced, and sizable sums
changed hands, scenes collapsed, friends became enemies, or at
least no longer friends, and those who, like myself, seemed to
have an inner vision of the overall purpose of the project
encountered the most unlikely coincidences which set in motion
the beginnings of a new collaboration to attempt again that which
had just failed. Many times the coincidences which arrived, in
the course of my own shamanic journey, were so unusual and
unbelievable that I just ignored them; it would have been
pointless to speculate as to the origin or cause of such unlikely
events.
The overall lesson that was illustrated by my
experiences with several groups of collaborators was that a
modern technological and scientific approach to shamanism,
although rewarding for individuals and small groups able to exist
on the periphery of modern "bigness", was not going to
restore the equilibrium between man and nature within the
confines of the present social reality of Western Civilization.
The modern and artificial distinction of man being apart from
nature seemed to be a direct result of psychedelic ignorance, and
the "bigness" of the modern system of life exaggerated
the distinction so much so that the ecology of the life of early
psychedelic man simply could not be re-created within our modern
system. Hence every attempt to produce sizable quantities of
psychedelics inevitably met a swift retribution; and each time
there occurred a new wave of popularity of psychedelic use which
attracted public attention, that use seemed to degenerate quickly
into misuse, and the majority of those seekers lose sight of the
spirit of their original awakening, just as had entire
civilizations before them.
The tribal nature of the societies of early man had
provided the ideal milieu for beneficial psychedelic use, and the
nature of our own society now prevented its own conversion to a
more ecological, satisfying, and psychedelically-educated way of
life. The only project that made sense therefore, was to attempt
to influence only small groups of people, individuals who would
themselves integrate their psychedelic experience by blending in
discreetly with our modern insanity to influence again only a
small circle of friends, keeping a spark alive and teaching
valuable activities that would be necessary for a future in which
the inevitable if slow collapse of modern civilization into chaos
would eventually restore regional and small, "tribal"
societies to their former importance. Whether that future was to
be a time of great pain and destruction, or relatively benign,
no-one could hope to predict. Certainly, psychedelic education
would help to promote a beneficial transition and prepare those
so educated for the inevitable changes that lay ahead. The
psychedelically-educated would hopefully be able to provide the
wisdom necessary to guide others through a transition that will
certainly be difficult, yet perhaps not cataclysmic if the goal
of modern shamanism were to be adequately realized in time.
It has long been the accepted wisdom among most
scientists, as well as the common mythology of public perception,
that the rise of tool-making, i.e., technology, was an
important, if not defining characteristic of the evolutionary
process connecting advanced apes to Early Man. Specifically, it
has long been hypothesized that Darwinian selection for
increasingly intelligent hominids came about through selection
for the best abilities to make and use tools. In the extreme, at
least before recent studies of tool use and especially tool-making
in some animal species, the technology of tools was thought to be
a primary defining characteristic separating Homo sapiens
from the animal kingdom. Also among extremities of interpretation
has been the idea that tool-making and early technology might
even have been the force driving the extraordinarily rapid
increase in the size of the primate brain, from the first
hominids of two or three million years ago with a brain volume of
about 400 cubic centimeters, to modern man with a brain volume
more than three times this figure.
It is understandably important to science to
explain this evolution in brain size, for it has often been noted
that, on an evolutionary timescale, the rapidity of the change
was practically unprecedented. Since the middle Pleistocene,
about a half-million years ago, the rate of increase was
particularly rapid, so much so that it has even been suggested
that the enlargement might actually have been somewhat
pathological, leading to a being whose irrationality and
capability for wanton destructiveness equals or excels his
creativity. Certainly, the history of the Twentieth Century has
been a pinnacle of both tendencies, and also requires an
explanation, and a resulting solution, if we wish to ensure our
future survival. But even though we may have vestigial organs
such as the appendix, and "skeuomorphic instincts" as I
have discussed, blaming our present situation on purported faults
of evolution is neither productive nor scientifically logical.
The mere proposal of a hypothesis that we have too much brain
power for our own good goes a long way to suggest that we must
therefore have the brain power to correct any such tendency to
let foolishness dominate our lives; scapegoating is seldom a
productive hypothesis.
It now appears that the tool-making hypotheses also
have resulted less from a careful analysis of the data than from
superficial concurrence of two tendencies. We have complex
technology, we have large brains, animals have neither. Seeing
that there are facilitations and parallels between technology and
brain power does not, however, provide more than circumstantial
evidence for causation. And recent work now makes it extremely
likely that the ability to produce technology, it has been called object-intelligence
for want of a better term, has been a development that has
"piggy-backed" upon a much more important development
in intelligence, that which is required for social
transaction. A recent collection of the important papers
providing the foundation for the theory of Machiavellian
Intelligence has been published as a book (2), and I will not present an extensive
argument here for its well-founded conclusions. One quotation
should suffice to illustrate that even anthropologists such as
Thomas Wynn, who might be surmised to have a "vested
interest" in the importance of tool-use and making in the
development of early hominids, has whole-heartedly agreed with
the new view:
Given the evidence of brain evolution and the
archaeological evidence of technological evolution, I think
it fair to eliminate from consideration the simple scenario
in which ability to make better and better tools selected for
human intelligence. At almost no point in hominid evolution
was there even a provocative correlation. The earliest known
hominids, Australopithecus afarensis, had a brain
larger than an ape's of equivalent size, but as far as we
know, no greater reliance on tools. Early Homo at 2 Ma
[million years ago] had a much more 'encephalized' brain, but
the tools and even the context of use were not beyond the
capacity of modern apes. Homo erectus did possess
technology that was outside the range of ape behaviour, but
by this time, 1.5 Ma, much of the encephalization of the Homo
line had already occurred. In sum, most of the evolution of
the human brain, the presumed anatomy of intelligence, had
occurred prior to any evidence for technological
sophistication and, as a consequence, it appears unlikely
that technology itself played a central role in the evolution
of this impressive human ability. (3)
As one of the contributors to the book remarked,
Wynn's paper "is a bombshell to the older 'Tools makyth Man'
view... Wynn throws the question of the cause of human brain size
back into the realm of the invisible: either the social
relationships or the lifestyle which produced technology, not the
technology itself." (4)
The conclusions of the Machiavellian
Intelligence hypothesis fit well with my own theory, and lead
to the most probable evolutionary scenario for the influence of
psychedelic plants in the emergence of modern humans. The
arguments of the hypothesis show that the complexity of logical
operations required for social interaction in large groups of
individuals is far greater than that required for tool use or
making, or for that matter any other activity of primate species. (5) Studies of
societies of monkeys and apes in both natural and controlled
environments strongly support the theoretical arguments. The
brain size of various species of modern primates, for example,
has been closely correlated with the size and complexity of the
social groups of the various species studied. The complexity of
social interaction would increase geometrically with the number
of possible interrelations between animals in a group consisting
of three or more generations of relatively long-lived animals.
Complex dominance relationships, alliances, group undertakings
such as efficient foraging and hunting, lengthy childhood, and
relatively constant possibility of mating activity add to the
complexity. The demands of increasing social complexity was a
development requiring far faster biological evolution of the
equipment which facilitated it than any previous set of demands
such as tool use and manufacture, climate change, interactions
with other species, or other hypothesized evolutionary pressures.
Thus it is reasonable that the rapid increase in brain size among
primates requires no other explanation, despite its unprecedented
speed.
The proposal of early influence of psychedelic
plants on hominid evolution as a factor in brain enlargement
(between one and five million years ago), as suggested by Terence
McKenna, is therefore difficult to support. Criticism of
McKenna's theory as presented in his Food of the Gods has
been sometimes dismissive, (6) and although I find much of value in
the book, I would have to agree that his proposals that
psychedelics were "mutation-causing" agents that
"directly influenced the rapid reorganization of the brain's
information-processing capacities" are unsupported by
evidence, and unnecessary in light of the much more reasonable Machiavellian
Intelligence hypothesis. The temptation to explain the rapid
evolution of the primate brain has led more than one author to
error, however. What McKenna overlooked was a much more recent
period of prehistory in which a proposed psychedelic influence
fits a wide range of facts like a glove. In the preceding
chapters I have outlined many of these facts, and it remains now
to show at what period an intervention of psychedelic influence
is most likely in consideration of several areas of knowledge
about fossils, human genetics, climate changes and catastrophic
events, and other sources of information. The necessity for
psychedelic intervention has already been established in previous
chapters, the question of when such intervention occurred is the
present concern.
Before presenting possible evolutionary scenarios
however, let me explore further the idea of social complexity and
its relation to the habit routine model of cognitive operation I
have proposed earlier. I stated that the power of the habit
routine cognitive system would have increased with the increasing
complexity of animal species, and would have reached its summit
in proto-man. The Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis
and its proposed increasing social complexity fits perfectly with
my surmise. Increased social complexity and the evolution of a
large, expensive to support nervous system go hand in hand with
extreme reliance on habit routine generation as the primary
cognitive mechanism. One major consideration is that a large
brain requires an excellent and copious diet, a requirement that
would be fulfilled best in a social group able to cooperate on
the highest levels to procure and share a wide variety of
nutritious foods. An ability to avoid toxic plants as well would
depend on complex social relationships as I will show in a
moment.
It might be said that all these requirements would
be an argument against the use of psychedelic agents in
such social groups, an argument with which I entirely agree! The
increasing social complexity and food requirements are arguments
for the increasing power of sophiolytic tendencies and habits
that would prevent any cognitive breakthrough to using the new
brain for purposes other than the maintenance of social order and
survival, a significant strengthening of the habit routine
system. Experimentation with new foods, such as psychedelic
plants, would not in normal circumstances have been a common, or
even likely occurrence. Two quotations concerning the diet and
food sources for primates will illustrate the point, the first
quotation concerning the necessity for a rich and complex diet,
the second on the ways this is fulfilled while yet preventing
exposure to toxic (or presumably psychedelic) items:
Monkeys and apes have to balance their diet, which they do
by wide ranging and yet selective eating; this is nicely
illustrated by a study of Sri Lankan monkeys, Macaca
sinica, by Marcel Hladik. By careful observation and
quantification of their feeding, and phytochemical analysis
of their food plants, he was able to show that for these
'frugivorous' monkeys, fruit was always more abundant than
they could ever need. However, the monkeys had large day
ranges and occupied a home range too large for efficient
defense as a territory. Why? Their ranging was apparently a
consequence of a need to eat fungi, rotten wood, insects,
bark, shoots-a whole range of items that allowed them to make
up the protein, vitamin, and mineral deficiencies of the
energy-rich ripe fruit (Hladik 1975). The need for a balanced
diet forces many primates to eat items that are hard to find.
In studying baboon ecology, I was continually amazed at the
subtle cues that they must use to identify some of their
plant foods; at the most harsh time of year, the main
survival foods were all either underground, or tiny and
inconspicuous. (7)
Mother primates of several species pull their infants away
from novel objects (two species of macaque), or remove foods
from infants if the food is not part of the diet
(chimpanzee). Caro and Hauser suggest that the latter might
be 'accidental', but having seen it happen in gorillas, I
doubt this (Anne Russon, who has noted the same in
orang-utans, shares my scepticism). An infant gorilla was
fiddling with and chewing at a leaf (of a species not
normally eaten), facing away from the mother who was eating
herself, when the mother broke off her feeding, reached over
the infant's head and took the leaf, dropping it well out of
the infant's reach. In the case of a chimpanzee watched by
Mariko Hiraiwa-Hasegawa (1986), the mother not only did the
same, but systematically picked every other leaf of the same
species in the infant's reach and placed her foot firmly on
the pile of leaves! But in any of these cases, the function
is unclear: does the behaviour serve to teach, or simply to
remove infants from danger? (8)
It has been proposed (9) that the dietary requirements of animals with
complex nervous systems was itself a factor in the evolution of
hominid intelligence, the increasing need for a high-quality diet
selecting for advances in intelligence and larger brains, which
itself would demand further dietary improvements. This must
certainly be the case, but I think that the methods used by
advancing species to procure better and better diets are
themselves aspects of social behavior, and thus fall under the
hypotheses of Machiavellian Intelligence. It was only
through the advancing complexity of social life that the dietary
requirements could be met, either for the actual procurement and
sharing of foodstuffs or for the transmission of the knowledge of
how to obtain them, and how to avoid serious errors such as
ingesting toxic items.
As I have just suggested, if increased social
complexity and the need for a correspondingly complex diet to
satisfy the needs of a large brain indicate anything, they would
seem to argue against much use of psychedelic plants in
advanced apes and proto-man. Indeed, an individual who
accidentally ingested a plant which disrupted his function and
place in such a social system would most likely lose that place,
and possibly be ostracized and excluded from the group. This is
the substance of Andrew Weil's comments on McKenna's hypothesis
(footnote 6). Psychedelic influence on H. erectus and even
more remote human predecessors is of course possible, as
McKenna's model suggests, but I believe it was unlikely, and if
so, unimportant to either social or neurological evolution.
Certainly, evidence is very sparse indeed, and there are
important counter-arguments to be considered: For example, H.
erectus lived on 3 continents in various habitats and through
several periods of disruptive climatic change for a period of 1
or 2 million years, yet remained in a relatively unchanging
state, with few signs of significant cultural or technological
innovation. This is certainly a sign of normal, slow evolution,
not psychedelic evolution. By contrast, the culture of early
Greece, with psychedelic influence, advanced dramatically from a
quite primitive state to an advanced civilization in the space of
a thousand years or so. In addition, the progression from Australopithecus
to erectus to sapiens involved many different
anatomical developments, not only brain size and reorganizations,
but speech-enabling changes to the larynx, (10) even an enlargement of nerve canals
in the spine suggested as facilitating the precise diaphragm
control needed for speech, (11) and many other anatomical changes.
This is certainly an argument for slow gradual evolution, not
psychedelically-enabled or "psychedelic-mutagenic"
evolution as suggested by McKenna.
From the preceding arguments concerning social
stability, we may thus surmise that the influence of psychedelics
on our immediate ancestors must have also involved some other
simultaneous and important changes or events which helped to
suppress the described tendencies to greater and greater
dependence on habit routine and the sophiolytic mode. Some
unusual change must have occurred to allow and ensure that
psychedelic use would occur on a significant scale and would
rapidly and irreversibly transform the habits of the hominid
group that was the precursor of modern humans.
It is necessary to point out, however, that the
very brain changes which facilitated social evolution and a
powerful habit routine cognitive system would be the same changes
that would make an eventual psychedelic intervention most
effective: A greatly expanded cortex to allow the storage of
long-lasting and complex memory data used for habit routine
search, would also implement creativity that was far more than
random trial and error, creativity that could intentionally
produce wide-ranging positive results: we would not expect
attempts at creativity by a small-brained animal to result in
much more than increased risk for that animal. A greatly expanded
portion of the cortex involved with "association
processing" allowing the assembly of habit routines of a
multisensory and intentional complexity, would also facilitate
highly effective creativity. And a greatly expanded frontal
cortex, the seat of working memory and other advanced cognitive
abilities, facilitating habit routine based upon simultaneous
nested levels of intentionality, would likewise be instrumental
to a being requiring the frequent use of improvisation in
situations which involved simultaneous trains of logical
operations. The same nervous system improvements that enable
advanced habit routine generation and use also provide for
psychedelically-enlightened operation that is productive and
creative, and not just hazardous to an animal. Here we have an
additional argument against the influence of psychedelic agents
at an early, small-brained stage of hominid evolution:
psychedelics would not have "worked" on animals with
limited brain capabilities. We might say that psychedelics
haven't really "worked" on humans either, considering
our backsliding tendencies to ignore (and eradicate) psychedelic
tribal wisdom that has accumulated for millennia. The present
state of Western Civilization in this "century of
holocaust" is a direct result of that ignorance, and if it
should lead to the scenarios of devastation and collapse which
have all too often been predicted by some, we will have to
conclude that the great experiment, the psychedelic intervention,
will indeed have been a failure.
One further argument will suffice to eliminate from
consideration an early psychedelic influence on hominid
evolution. The role of language in hominid development has been
another hotly-debated topic of late. It is my contention that the
psychedelic state of consciousness would have been of little or
no value for an individual, and would have provided no
evolutionary breakthrough for a social group which did not
already have the benefit of complex language abilities.
Psychedelic use and its effects are most valuable as a cumulative
phenomenon. The psychedelic experience must not only be
individually integrated but socially integrated as well, if it is
to provide a key to rapid cultural advance. There must arise a
"psychedelic culture" which is transmitted and
developed from one generation to the next, and through which the
beginnings of shamanism can arise. Without symbolic language, it
is difficult to see how such a process might happen. Once a
fairly complex language ability had evolved, however, we may
imagine that psychedelic experience would have provided an
impetus for further important language development into abilities
concerned with the expression of the abstract, the mythical, the
artistic, language capable of elaborating and transmitting tradition,
the hallmark of culture.
Whereas written language is a cultural phenomenon
which must be taught, (a child who is not taught to read and
write will certainly not pick up the ability spontaneously),
spoken language is assimilated spontaneously. Spoken
language is a biologically-inherent feature of the human
brain, a realization that became apparent to the linguist Noam
Chomsky several decades ago. Steven Pinker, a former student of
Chomsky, has made several conclusions concerning language and its
evolution which are pertinent to a hypothesis of the time period
in which psychedelic influence might have played a role in human
evolution. (12) On
the strength of much recent research, Pinker concludes that the
first anatomically modern humans already spoke the
equivalent of modern human language. Since language is intrinsic
to the brain structures which produce and interpret it, language
must have co-evolved with those structures, and have been fully
realized with the advent of the brain with which it co-evolved.
Spoken language was therefore not "invented" at a late
stage of that evolution, (although reading and writing most
certainly were). Since language is inherently a social
phenomenon, this proposed co-evolution of brain and language fits
nicely with the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis of
brain advances being driven by social requirements, including the
advancement of language capability.
Pinker notes therefore that "language did not
first appear in the Upper Paleolithic beginning about 30,000
years ago, contrary to claims frequently seen in
archaeological...and popular science treatments." (13) The idea that
psychedelics would not have "worked" on our
small-brained forbears such as Australopithecus is
supported by the proposed necessity of the existence of complex
language as a precursor for the beneficial influence of
psychedelics, and considerably narrows the time frame in which
such influence must have played its role. Using conclusions from
linguistics and brain evolution, we see that such a time frame
should extend from about 150Ka to 50Ka (thousand years ago). I
shall further narrow this window of opportunity for psychedelic
influence in my arguments to follow. The important conclusion
which has just been developed is that psychedelic plants in the
environment cannot have played any significant role in either the
early development of language, nor in the parallel development
and tripling in size of the hominid brain during the period from
about 3Ma to the appearance of anatomically modern humans about
150Ka.
Considering the importance of language in
evolution, and the importance of language for various modern
arguments as to how the process of man's evolution took place,
some further comments are appropriate which will tie together
some ideas expressed in previous chapters with the task at hand.
It is widely hypothesized, quite correctly I believe, that major
enhancements to spoken language occurred during the Upper
Paleolithic with the appearance of anatomically modern hominids.
As Pinker has noted, certain observers thus wish to believe that
language itself was practically non-existent before this period.
The argument of language being inherent to the brain structures
which produce it, and therefore of the necessity that language
co-evolved with those brain structures is a powerful rebuttal of
such ideas, but additional evidence also favors the co-evolution
claim. As noted in the last chapter, rudimentary language
abilities have now been definitively shown to exist in our
closest relative, the chimpanzee. It was also noted that language
abilities are not used by chimpanzees in the wild, but the fact
that these primitive language capabilities exist at all must
indicate that rudimentary brain circuitry for producing language
nevertheless exists. If such circuitry was present, albeit in
very primitive form, at the period of divergence between the Panidae
and early hominids, it is unreasonable to assume that such
circuitry might continue to evolve for the next several million
years, to be used suddenly at the Upper Paleolithic to produce
complex language which had no precedent whatsoever. The only
argument here could be that these brain areas which later
permitted spoken language were all along used for another
function altogether.
Although I feel that chimpanzee language ability,
and certainly the arguments of Pinker and other linguists,
strongly favor the continuous existence and development of
language throughout hominid development, the alternative use
argument just cited brings us to another consideration which is
important to my theory. Referring back to figure 1 in chapter 3
and the associated text, it will be seen that according to my
cognitive hypothesis, language is but one, if the most obvious
and important, of the symbolizing functions of the
thinking1-thinking2 conglomerate. In other words, language, the
serial realization of thinking in abstract symbolic form, is not
itself the material or medium of the thought
process until a late stage, and is not necessarily a part of the
thinking process at all. My model is, of course, in contention
with the majority of recently proposed cognitive models of the
function and construction of language, and I do not expect its
easy acceptance: only the evidence of the many-sided picture that
my theory of psychedelic experience presents might have the power
to convince scientists today that the cognitive model of
thinking1-thinking2 processes might have some general
applicability. The neurologist Harry Jerison, for example,
proposes that language itself is the medium of reflective thought
and imagery:
"The role of language in communication first evolved
as a side effect in the construction of reality,"
proposes Harry Jerison, a neurologist at the University of
California, Los Angeles, who has made a special study of
brain evolution. "We can think of language as being
merely an expression of another neural contribution to the
construction of mental imagery." Brains throughout
evolutionary history have been shaped to construct an inner
world appropriate to a species' daily life. In amphibians,
vision provides the principal element of that world; for
reptiles, an acute sense of smell. For the earliest mammals,
hearing was additionally important; and in primates, a
melange of sensory input creates a complete mental model of
external reality. Humans, says Jerison, have added a further
component: language, or more precisely, reflective thought
and imagery. Thus equipped, the human mind creates an
internal model of the world that is uniquely capable of
representing and coping with complex practical and social
challenges. Inner reflection, not outer communication, was
the facility upon which natural selection worked, argues
Jerison. Language was its medium-and, at the same time, an
efficient tool for communication. This hypothesis now has
wide support. (14)
Too bad. I believe the hypothesis that language is
the medium of the construction of mental models of
reality, is misguided. But it wouldn't be the first instance in
the history of science where the experts were wrong. Firstly, as
stated here, the model implies that without language, the
construction of mental models of the world, by animals for
instance, is minimal. Yet the habit routine cognitive model shows
that the habit routine, constructed by thinking1 processes and
analyzed by thinking2 processes, is the mental model of
reality we are concerned with, and that the transformation into
language or other forms of symbolization is a subsidiary,
secondary, and non-essential process occurring in thinking2. As I
have argued previously, the habit routine system has been the
constant companion of animal life from the beginning, it is the
primary function of all animal nervous systems, not just
advanced ones such as our own. It is interesting how close the
above quotation comes to the idea of the habit routine model as
the mechanism of construction of the "mental model of
external reality," ("a melange of sensory input creates
a complete mental model of external reality") but then
misses the necessary conclusion. Jerison's model would have the
symbolization function as the primary cognitive operation, but
that would require that the "raw material" of
symbolization be the primary sensory information rather than the
generated habit routine, and a great deal of evidence, summarized
in previous chapters, argues against this model.
Language is not at all the medium of the
thinking processes which precedes symbolization, which is a
resonance to the habit routine and its analysis. Language as it
is realized, or other forms of symbolization such as the
production of gesture or music, perhaps also the expression of
emotion via facial expression and general posture, are serial
processes, yet the habit routine, the internal model of the
world, is iconic. It is a Gestalt, a constantly changing
and updated holistic entity not requiring elaboration
through a serial process of point for point representation with
abstract symbols as does language. Our basic thinking process is
in terms of icons or Gestalts, holoprojections, which
later, and sometimes very laboriously, may find only incomplete
and unsatisfactory expression through the symbolization
processes. Consider this statement by Albert Einstein, describing
the way he considered his creative thinking to occur:
"The words of the language, as they are written or
spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of
thought. The psychical entities in my case are . . . visual
and some of muscular type. Conventional words and other signs
have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary
stage."
Thus many recent views of language and thinking
miss the essential fact that the great part of what constitutes
thinking, both conscious and pre-conscious as with the
construction of the habit routine, has nothing to do with the
serial process of spoken language at all. The creation of the
mental model of reality is not "linguistic" except in
the sense that we might define a new type of "language"
constituted not of words and the rules for serially connecting
them, but of the very iconic Gestalts that are created by habit
routine search. The evolution of the ability to produce the habit
routine Gestalt started probably with the very first animals, as
I have discussed, but the evolution of spoken language only began
much later. The two evolutionary processes are very far apart
indeed, as are the brain processes which produce them.
The problem of the modern understanding of these
facts probably arises from the nature of the methods of modern
Western science itself. It is, above all, a descriptive
undertaking, and therefore a serial process rather than an experiential,
iconic one. So in attempting to "scientifically
explain" many of our cognitive abilities using descriptive language,
we must necessarily let serial symbolization rule our paradigm to
such an extent that we ignore certain aspects of the ongoing
iconic thinking process which is the seed of our explanations.
Thus the possible Gestalts which would themselves, if we became
aware of them, allow us an experience of the nature of the iconic
thinking processes which precede symbolization, of how they
provide the basis for symbolization, are ignored by the
requirements of our paradigm to provide only serial explanation:
these ignored Gestalts, the iconic habit routines which would
give a view of the nearly invisible underlying thinking
processes, do not activate the significance detection system
piloted by the locus coeruleus, because we have ruled them out
from consideration by the programming of working memory with the
specifics of our paradigm, this is the conscious feedback process
which is an input, along with sensory information, to the habit
routine generation process in thinking1 (see again figure 1).
Except in the reflection of those unusually perceptive and gifted
individuals such as Einstein who have developed life-long habits
of looking for the significant in what everyone else deems the
routine, the iconic nature of basic thinking processes is
therefore rendered invisible. As I have shown, of course, the
psychedelic experience can produce this very same result reliably
and safely, although it requires considerable experience with the
drugs to understand that this is what is happening, and to use
the effect to its potential. I might say, perhaps not too
ponderously I hope, that this entire book is the symbolization in
language of an iconic entity or Gestalt, a "mental
model" of my theory that I have been slowly constructing
over the years. I "know" full well its entire content
and form, and yes, it seems to be visual and even
"muscular" in a certain sense, but its translation into
serial language is another affair altogether, requiring entirely
different types of effort than the construction of the
informational entity which I am describing. Interestingly, the
symbolization in language does have a feedback to the
characteristics of the iconic Gestalt: the fine points of its
significance, the small details of the interrelations of its
parts seem to be refined as the experimental process of
symbolization attempts to capture its essence in words.
Other parts of my theory, such as the
neuromechanics of HRS, the cognitive operations mapped in figure
1, and other "pieces of the puzzle," are models, useful
aids, heuristic devices useful until better models come along, a
development which must surely come to pass considering the
speculative methods which led to their proposal. But the
suggestion of an evolutionary scenario for human development
attempts to establish an actual series of events in history, if
pre-history. Considering the very fragmentary evidence in the
fossil record, and the indirect nature of other modern evidence
to be described below, the chance for error in proposing the
story of how Early Man made his way out of Eden is humbling. As
we have seen above, the first theory of psychedelic evolution,
that of McKenna, has suffered, perhaps terminally, from a dose of
counterargument all too easily supplied by the critics.
Much of McKenna's book remains admirable however,
for instance his presentation of evidence indicating the probable
importance of psychedelic plants for the very early tribal
societies which lived on the Tassili Plateau of southern Algeria,
or Çatal Hüyük in central Anatolia. These are examples, along
with ancient Greece and the Eleusinian Mysteries, which
illustrate the rapid flowering of culture possible in societies
in which there is strong, if not incontrovertible evidence of
psychedelic use. The importance of psychedelics for early man
certainly suggests an important evolutionary influence as well:
the trick is to deduce, using a wide variety of ancient and
modern evidence, when and where, and why that evolutionary
influence might have taken place. Let me start by considering
some modern reinterpretations of the fossil evidence which have
recently received overwhelming support from one of science's most
recent and fascinating developments, molecular genetics.
Chris Stringer, who is today the head of the Human
Origins Group of the Natural History Museum in London, recounts a
most interesting tale of scientific discovery in his recent book, African
Exodus, co-authored by the science writer Robin McKie. It is
the kind of story which has epitomized the romance and excitement
of scientific discovery and revolution as perceived by the lay
public, stories such as the Curies' discovery of radium or
Galileo's road to revolutionary views of the heavens. The
important periods of these scientists' work were, of course,
marked far more by hard work than by romance! But not only is the
story of these recent discoveries concerning human origins of
interest to the general public, it represents a scientific
revolution of important scope, comparable to the recent
revolution in geology with the advent of the discovery of plate
tectonics, or even the revolution in physics earlier in the
century.
The first chapters of African Exodus are
concerned with a close examination of the "bones and
stones," in which Dr. Stringer shows how the Multiregional
Hypothesis (15) of
human evolution, the predominant model for most of this century,
has just recently been discredited in favor of an Out-of-Africa
(actually an Out-of-Africa II) (16) model. A new mathematical technique,
multivariate analysis, used by Dr. Stringer during his several
years of work on the fossils, led him to doubt the validity of
the multiregional theory early on in his career. But only a small
minority of paleoanthropologists were ready to listen to new
analyses of fossil characteristics which called into question the
status quo of their profession, for many great scientists of the
past decades had analyzed these same fossils and there was wide
consensus that a multiregional scenario was the correct one. The
upheavals and conflicts typical of a newly-born scientific
revolution ensued. A revolutionary new idea proposed by a small
group of scientists, at first rejected as absurd by the
establishment, soon began to topple that establishment. Chris
Stringer and Robin McKie introduce the book:
For the past few years, a small group of scientists has
been accumulating evidence that has revolutionised our
awareness of ourselves, and our animal origins. They have
shown that we belong to a young species, which rose like a
phoenix from a crisis which threatened its very survival, and
then conquered the world in a few millennia. The story is an
intriguing and mysterious one, and it challenges many basic
assumptions we have about ourselves... It is a remarkable,
and highly controversial narrative that has generated
headlines round the world and which has been the subject of a
sustained programme of vilification by scientists who have
spent their lives committed to the opposing view that we have
an ancient, million-year-old ancestry. The debate, which
reverberates in museums, universities and learned
institutions across the world, is one of the most bitter in
the history of science. (17)
What finally broke the dam of resistance to the new
ideas was the entry upon the scene of revolutionary new
techniques from a field which had previously played no role
whatever in paleoanthropology, molecular genetics. Until very
recently, the possibility that we might learn something about the
evolution of our distant ancestors by studying the genetic makeup
of living humans was hardly even suspected, and of course the
techniques for doing so completely unknown. But all this changed
rapidly as the science of molecular genetics grew from its
infancy in the 1960's to the powerful tool it is today. The use
of genetic analysis for understanding evolution, the science of molecular
anthropology, also had its beginning the 1960's, with the
pioneering work of Allan Wilson (later to be a key player in the
confirmation of the Out-of-Africa scenario) and Vincent Sarich.
It was their early work that began to topple many sacred cows of
paleoanthropology, the first to fall being the idea that apes and
humans had diverged very early, between fifteen and thirty Ma. By
comparing protein structures of modern apes and man, Wilson and
Sarich concluded that the separation could have been no earlier
than 5Ma. "We were variously ignored, abused and
scorned," recalls Sarich. But it was the first of many
venerable precepts of paleoanthropology that was to fall to the
new techniques of genetic analysis. The research of Wilson and
the many others who followed came along at precisely the right
time to resoundingly confirm the early work of Stringer.
Stringer and McKie mention in their introduction
above that our species "rose like a phoenix from a crisis
which threatened its very survival," and propose later on in
the book the occurrence of a population bottleneck sometime about
100 to 150Ka. The possibility of such a bottleneck has also drawn
criticism from defenders of the orthodoxy, yet again the genetic
evidence is what has come to the forefront to support the
proposal.
The genetic evidence in question was not at first
concerned with the DNA of the cell nuclei, found in every cell of
the body and which is responsible for control of the growing
embryo and inheritance of physical traits, but DNA contained the mitochondria
of these same cells. These small structures within animal cells
act like metabolic power-packs, enabling the biochemical
reactions which provide the cell with energy. That these
structures contain their own DNA, entirely different from nuclear
DNA, is something of a curiosity, and has led to speculation that
very early on in evolution, mitochondria might have been a
separate organism which developed a symbiotic relationship with
primitive single-celled life forms to enable the evolution of the
first true single-celled animals. Whatever their evolutionary
story, the mitochondria and their independently organized DNA
strands have provided an important key for the understanding of
hominid evolution. Two specific characteristics of mtDNA
(mitochondrial DNA) figure importantly: firstly, mtDNA is
transmitted only through the female lineage, since the
mitochondria of sperm reside in the cell's extranuclear
protoplasm, and do not enter the egg at fertilization. Thus mtDNA
provides a powerful tool for tracing genealogies in animals, and
reconstructing recent evolutionary trees. Secondly, mtDNA has a
relatively high and constant rate of random mutation which is
conveniently analyzed, thus constituting a "molecular
clock" providing genetic markers for accurately tracing
migration and fissioning in human societies. A recent paper by
Rebecca L. Cann, an early associate of Allan C. Wilson, explains
more fully the peculiarities of mtDNA which result in its being
such a powerful tool for the study of evolution. Concerning the
bottleneck hypothesis resulting from mtDNA studies she recounts:
When I began my study of mtDNA in the late 1970s with Dr.
Allan C. Wilson, one of his postdoctoral fellows, Dr. Wesley
Brown, was writing up his work on a study of 21 human mtDNAs.
Dr. Brown had discovered that using restriction fragment
length polymorphisms (RFLPs), humans as a species looked
'different' to other mammals. He found that in comparison to
two chimpanzees, or two gorillas, or two orang-utans, or two
gibbons, or even two pocket gophers, humans had only one-half
to one-fifth of the intraspecific variability seen in our
closest primate relatives and other genetically
well-characterized mammals. In 1980, Brown proposed that the
level of variability sampled in his study was consistent with
the derivation of the human mitochondrial sequence from a
single female about 200,000 years ago. This was the origin of
the bottle-neck hypothesis and mitochondrial 'Eve'. (18)
The mitochondrial "Eve" hypothesis
naturally made big headlines, was featured on the cover of such
magazines as Time and Newsweek, and also quite
naturally was journalistically exaggerated out of all proportion
to the original claims. A concerted attack by the
multiregionalist "old guard" also helped to make the
new idea sound a bit absurd, both to the public, and to
scientists in other fields not yet acquainted with the genetic
evidence. All the criticisms have been adequately countered
however, and the findings confirmed by newer and more complete
studies, including studies on the nuclear DNA. Rebecca Cann was
careful to explain, in the above quoted paper, the intended
interpretation of the hypothesis concerning the possible number
of individuals existing at the time of the proposed bottleneck.
Since mtDNA is passed on only through the female lineage, the
existence of a mitochondrial "Eve" does not imply that
our nuclear DNA is also descended from a single
individual, nor that at one point the human lineage was reduced
to a single, or mere handful of individuals (the "Biblical
Eve" scenario!) Recent estimates of the number of
individuals existing at the time of the bottleneck, including
that of Chris Stringer, puts the number at perhaps ten thousand. (19) It may be argued
that a population of ten thousand individuals is not what one
could call a genetic bottleneck, yet the sum of the genetic
evidence indicates that "there were at least 100,000 adult
archaic forebears of our Africa ancestors about 200,000 years
ago." (20)
Thus a decrease to 10,000 individuals is certainly a
"population crash" indicative of important events in
the early evolution of modern man.
As for the date of the lifetime of
"mitochondrial Eve," there have been various estimates
between the extremes of about 60 to 400Ka based on several
different methods of mtDNA analysis. Some best estimates put the
life of "mitochondrial Eve" at about 130 to 140Ka,
"the date of origin of modern humans." (21) The uncertainties in these several
estimates may be narrowed by considering data from other fields
of study, and from a view of the overall evolutionary scenario
which emerges upon consideration of all the information at our
disposal, including my own hypotheses of the influence of
psychedelics on the overall process. Using all these sources, a
reasonably constrained sequence of events with fairly accurate
dates becomes possible.
In looking at the combined evidence from new
interpretations of the "stones and bones," (Chris
Stringer's findings), the genetic evidence, (now far more
convincing than just a few years ago), and other pieces of the
puzzle, Stringer and other workers have come to the conclusion
that there must have been some kind of unusual event, some
catalyst, some kind of "trigger" which set in motion
the very rapid rise of human culture and civilization which began
a mere few moments ago on an evolutionary scale. The strong
evidence for a population bottleneck, during which time
individuals existed who were our sole ancestors, and the ensuing
rapid migration and rapid rise of human culture in every corner
of the earth, has led these workers to ask a central and
important question for which they have not yet formulated an
answer. Stringer and McKie write:
It was one of the critical events in mankind's convoluted
route to evolutionary success. The nature of the trigger of
this great social upheaval is still hotly debated, but
remains a mystery at the heart of our 'progress' as a
species. Was it a biological, mental or social event that
sent our species rushing pell-mell towards world domination?
Was it the advent of symbolic language, the appearance of the
nuclear family as the basic element of human social
structure, or a fundamental change in the workings of the
brain? Whatever the nature of the change, it has a lot to
answer for. It transformed us from minor bit players in a
zoological soap opera into evolutionary superstars, with all
the attendant dangers of vanity, hubris and indifference to
the fate of others that such an analogy carries with lt. (22)
Reading this paragraph in African Exodus, I
realized I had been for several years working on ideas which
constituted the very answer sought by this recent revolution in
thinking about human evolution. It was, as I have said in chapter
2, "Models and Theories," a falling into place of
pieces of a puzzle which justified so much earlier "wild
speculation," a realization that practically by accident I
had found a key that many others were actively searching for
which would enable the opening of a door to an important future
in understanding.
Rebecca Cann asks,
We often wonder if language played a part of the process,
and that our ancestors all had some new mutations which
allowed them to spread, at the expense of the other
indigenous peoples. [Results of genetic research] suggest the
spread of our ancestors was rapid, with little mixing. (23)
Although language certainly played a part in the
process, as I have already discussed, the identity of the
trigger, the origin of the population bottleneck, the reason
behind man's migration to the ends of the earth, the factor
enabling the rapid rise of culture independently in all these
regions, the factor behind the ability of the new hominids to
out-compete all former races of archaic man, the secret of the
birth of the human race, may all be intimately related to one and
the same phenomenon: the advent of psychedelic use by a
regionally isolated group of proto-humans somewhere in Africa.
Such use might then have spread with the spread of the
descendants of this core group of individuals, mimicking a
population bottleneck in that psychedelic use and the advantages
it provided were closely guarded secrets not evident or available
to competing "tribes." As I stated previously, if a
member of a competing "tribe" were to use the new
medicine, it would only serve to isolate him from his own group.
Psychedelic use could then have been at once the reason for an
apparent but not necessarily absolute bottleneck, and also the
trigger, the key which enabled this original group to expand and
prosper by virtue of the cognitive advantages provided by the
cumulative effects of psychedelic use. These advantages, I remind
the reader, concern a new and powerful ability to suspend a mode
of existence entirely governed by habit routine. The advanced ape
that was our predecessor necessarily had, as I have shown, the
most complete, one might say irrevocable dependence on habit
routine of any animal yet evolved, a dependence entirely
precluding the use of the most advanced nervous system ever
evolved for creative purposes.
But what of that other facilitating factor I
mentioned before, the one that would allow psychedelic use to
become important and not just an infrequent and disorienting
event for single individuals who might then expulsed from their
group? Some environmental or social situation must have resulted
in the frequent use of psychedelics by a significant proportion
of the core group, and psychedelic use must then have become part
and parcel of the social structure of the group. There are
several possibilities. Here another body of research information
on climate change becomes important, for during the proposed
period between 100Ka and 200Ka, drastic climatic changes were
occurring on a time scale certain to disrupt all life on the
planet, especially those advanced forms of life so dependent on
social complexity and a diversified diet.
In view of the best estimates for the time slot for
the population bottleneck and mitochondrial Eve (about 133Ka), (24) a particular
period of climatic history stands out: the Eemian interglacial
period. During the Eemain, warm, wet, and tropical conditions
extended much further north than at present. The fossil evidence
shows that hippopotamuses browsed along the banks of the Thames
and the Rhine, while lions and elephants roamed the forests of
southern England. Until recently, the Eemian interglacial period
was thought to have been a stable climatic period lasting from
about 130Ka to 114Ka, when the beginning of the last ice age
commenced. Climatic information has been obtained from such
methods as analysis of ocean sediment cores, pollen cores from
terrestrial sources, and ice cores drilled in such locations as
Antarctica and Greenland. A recent ice core analysis from
Greenland however, has given us a radically new view of the
Eemain climatic era, indicating that it was not a period of
stability but rather one of wild climatic oscillations: (25)
The early part of the Eemian was dominated by several
oscillations between warm and cool stages. The temperature
dropped by as much as 10 degrees, sometimes within as short a
time as ten to thirty years. Some cold spells lasted a few
decades, while others lasted several hundred years. After
8000 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 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 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 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 agents as the first step
toward an organized shamanism, only our modern illusions of what
constitutes "progress" would predict that such a
society, if truly a society of man, would rapidly invent
and amass technology. A broader view would predict that what
would be amassed by the true Homo sapiens would be
techniques of living exhibiting a consciously designed harmony
and ecology, leading to long-lasting modes of tribal life
changing only slowly with time. Psychedelically enlightened
tribes would optimally remain stable for millennia. To restate:
Creativity in such a group would involve the creation and
preservation of myth and ritual, the gradual perfection of a
style of living, the elaboration of tradition, not a headlong
rush into exploitation of "resources" and a supposed
domination of nature.
Thus our originally psychedelically-enlightened
ancestors, the first humans, would have spread slowly and surely
from their original home, perhaps in East Africa, and carried
with them such traditions of stability and longevity. Only severe
challenges to their survival and continuation would result in
their use of the creative power to make radical changes in their
technology and lifestyle. Before long even a slow migration would
have brought descendants of the original core group into the
Middle East, as evidenced by fossils of modern humans in Israel
dated at 100Ka. (29)
We must remember that climatic changes after the end of the
Eemian, although following a general tendency toward the next ice
age, continued to include occasional but abrupt reversals as is
shown by the recent Greenland ice core studies. Migration was
likely therefore to have been a sporadic happening, as certain
habitats and food sources changed. Considering these tribes'
penchant for stability, intentional migration, just for the sake
of migration, was unlikely. The spread of our ancestors would
therefore have been slow and occasional, initiated by the
occasional climatic upheavals and other environmental challenges
such as volcanic eruption, changing food supplies, occurrence and
avoidance of diseases, and perhaps the search for new medicines
and psychedelic plants. We know from anthropological studies how
important are the recommendations of the shamans for decisions
taken by tribal elders, and it is thus possible that shamans also
greatly influenced decisions of our early ancestors concerning
their movements. The shamans' use and search for psychedelic
plants may well have initiated some early migrations.
It is necessary to understand the above described
tendencies that would naturally follow our original psychedelic
enlightenment to see why modern culture as we know it did not get
underway for over 60 thousand years. Tradition and stability
reigned for many thousands of years while a slow migration
brought human ancestors to Europe, Asia, and finally the
Americas. But the flowering of modern culture did not really get
underway until 40 thousand years ago, when art and body
ornamentation, sophisticated bone tools, built hearths and
structured living spaces, open site "religious"
burials, storage pits and social storage, quarries, the long
distance exchange of raw materials, long term occupation of harsh
environments, and signs of complex forward planning made a wide
appearance as evidenced in the archaeological record. (30) This apparently
sudden appearance of the roots of the modern age, in which the
beginnings of modern technology can be seen, is the phenomenon
that has challenged anthropologists the most. If anatomically and
cognitively modern humans began their specieshood in Africa
130Ka, why did it take so long for the modern trend to get
underway? And importantly, what was the catalyst which
precipitated this event so suddenly? Like all history, the
answers to such questions, even if they could be known, must
necessarily be very complex, a story that can be told in a
multitude of ways that might seem contradictory. Consider the
myriad ways the story of the eradication of Native American
populations can be told.
But some scholars have proposed that the sudden
flowering of the modern age beginning about 40Ka might actually
have been more gradual, and sporadic. Such ideas fit in with the
above observations on the likely characteristics of
psychedelically-enlightened societies. The appearance of the
previously-mentioned bone harpoons in Zaire, and other scattered
evidence may well indicate that local tribes made advances in
technology in fits and starts, in response to novel challenges,
and then returned to long periods of stability. The appearance of
cave art seems today from modern discoveries to be rather abrupt,
yet the quality of such art would indicate a long tradition of
artistic endeavor, certainly the artists of the Lascaux and
Cosquer caves were no amateurs, thousands of years of tradition
no doubt led up to their remarkable artistic abilities. New
discoveries of even more ancient sites are bound to indicate that
the first "artists" did not suddenly appear around 40
thousand years ago, but that artistic expression was a slowly
maturing phenomenon of very long duration indeed, going back to
the Eemian perhaps.
The psychedelic model of evolution of culture
therefore agrees that some recent interpretations of evidence
indicating a "sudden flowering" of culture beginning
about 40Ka is too drastic. Alison Brooks, an archeologist who
with John Yellen made the important finds in Zaire, states:
A closer scrutiny of the archeological record leads one to
inquire, Just how abrupt was the behavioral transition in
Europe? I believe that the gulf between the Middle
Paleolithic and the Upper Paleolithic has been artificially
widened by de-emphasizing the very real evidence of cultural
complexity in the former and overstressing the achievement of
early modern humans, who, in Europe, did not achieve all of
the behaviors usually cited as part of the Upper Paleolithic
"revolution" until the very end of the Pleistocene
[near 10,000 years ago]. (31)
One final surmise about the trigger events that may
have continued to push Early Man along the road to modern
civilization will bring this chapter to a close. If, according to
my theory, there was a gradual evolution of culture during the 70
thousand years between the Eemian and the period in which the
beginnings of modern culture are deemed to have begun 40 thousand
years ago, then we might look for the rapid, yet sporadic and
geographically independent advances in culture and technology to
coincide with known instances of rapid climatic change, with
instances of severe volcanic activity or other known or
to-be-discovered radical environmental influences during the
period. It will certainly be interesting to compare further
detailed analyses of the new Greenland ice cores to known and
future archeological discoveries in an attempt to correlate
cultural change with environmental disruption. Perhaps there will
never be enough evidence to write history about such pre-historic
times, but intriguing clues and parallel developments may well
appear that will at least allow the writing of a probable
scenario.
The question of how geographically isolated groups
of modern men all developed astounding cultural and technological
advances, and how at least two dozen different regional societies
of men experienced along with such changes a dramatic increase in
population, has been a puzzle for many archaeologists, linguists,
anthropologists, and other workers. In the words of Chris
Stringer and Robin McKie,
It is an extraordinary catalogue of achievements that seem
to have come about virtually from nowhere - though obviously
they did have a source. The question is: what was it? Did we
bring the seeds of this mental revolution with us when we
began our African Exodus, though its effects were so subtle
they took another 50,000 years to accumulate before
snowballing into a cultural and technological avalanche that
now threatens to engulf Homo sapiens? Or did that
final change occur later, and was it therefore more profound,
and much speedier in its effects? (32)
I believe the answer is neither of these, or rather
a combination of the two: The seeds of the revolution were indeed
carried by Homo sapiens from his birthplace in Africa, but
they were seeds which needed periodic stimulation to grow
vigorously. As I have argued, psychedelic wisdom does not of
itself propel societies to produce a "technological
avalanche" nor should we believe that "technological
avalanches" are inherently good. Psychedelic wisdom rather
leads to ecology, stability, and longevity. But when novel and
severe challenges present themselves to psychedelically-enabled
societies, they are able to react intelligently and with
foresight and complex long-range planning. This is perhaps the
most important difference between the true Homo sapiens
his animal forebears.
Thus the periodic and now well-established abrupt
climatic upheavals of the post-Eemian world became the catalyst
which successively and cumulatively forced tribes of men living
in many isolated areas of the globe to use their God-like powers
of creativity to advance technology in the interests of survival.
An ice age was approaching, with fits and starts, and global
climatic change was frequent and severe. If the cognitive seeds
existed, dormant in the sense of not automatically producing
technological change at a rate which we moderns believe essential
to our species, and these seeds existed in all the societies of
men around the globe, the fact of climatic change being a global
phenomenon would explain how these seeds flowered, or were forced
to grow independently in all these regions.
During the post-Eemian period, changes in the
earth's orbit were responsible for the climatic disruption and
slow onset of a new ice age. But such orbital changes have
sometimes been hypothesized as the catalyst for increased
volcanic activity as well. Whatever the cause, at least one
extremely severe volcanic eruption occurred during the period
leading up to that famous starting date for the beginning of
modern technology, and in line with my proposals, may have been a
major event pushing tribal societies around the world toward
radical changes in the effort to survive. Stringer and McKie tell
of the eruption:
The Earth was gripped by continuing climatic mayhem as
changes in its orbit began inexorably to push down the
world's thermostat. Then to add to these woes, about 74,000
years ago, Mount Toba on the island of Sumatra exploded in
the largest volcanic eruption of the past 450 million years.
The blast was 4,000 times more powerful than that of Mount St
Helens and would have sent more than 1,000 cubic kilometres
of dust and ash into the atmosphere, plunging the earth into
years-long volcanic winters. Summer temperatures could have
dropped by as much as twelve degrees centigrade, while
forests shrank, deserts spread, and in eastern Asia, a
prolonged winter monsoon would have swept clouds of dust from
inland deserts round the globe... Having evolved in warm
Savannah sun we nearly perished, huddled in cold dismal
misery as volcanic plumes straddled the earth. (33)
Examination of some recent charts of sea-levels and
estimated prevailing temperatures reveals that this event seems
to have brought on the most severe period of the last ice age.
The post-Eemian climate between 115Ka to 75Ka is now known to be
more changeable, the Greenland ice core data showing several
abrupt reversals, yet the same data show that after a significant
warming period peaking about 75Ka to 80Ka, a severe decline then
led into the very coldest period of the ice age. The whole of the
post-Eemian climatic turmoil may well have been the partner to
those original African seeds of modern culture which required
such periodic stimulation to grow. The volcanic eruption might
have been one of the most important instances driving societies
to improvise and find technological solutions in order to
survive, the aftermath of the Mount Toba event would have
disrupted flora and fauna world-wide, it would have caused food
shortages, driven intentional and planned migration in search of
resources, brought about wide experimentation with new foods and
medicinal plants, and perhaps even led to the appearance of new
or altered species of psychedelic plants such as the fungi which
might have proliferated in the wake of widespread forest death
and an abundance of decaying vegetation. Psilocybe cyanescens
for example, usually a fairly rare species, thrives in decaying
woody debris and in colder climes. It is also one of the more
powerful Psilocybe species.
It is certainly a difficult task to sift and weigh
all these factors in the attempt to propose a concise scenario
for psychedelic influence on early man. Two or more seemingly
contradictory scenarios might well have happened simultaneously
in different regions, or consecutively. The idea of psychedelic
evolution is still too new, and much more work will have to take
place with these new hypotheses in mind, trying to prove and
disprove the many resulting implications before we can decide on
a likely scenario. As I have said, this task is more than just
the construction of a temporary model, it is an attempt to
discover actual history and subject to real error.
References
1. The Forbidden Game, A
Social History of Drugs, 1975, Hodder and Stoughton Limited,
U.K. p230. (back)
2. Machiavellian Intelligence, Richard W.
Byrne and Andrew Whiten, editors, Clarendon Press, Oxford
University Press, 1988. (back)
3. ibid., chapter 20, "Tools and the
evolution of human intelligence," Thomas Wynn, p 283. (back)
4. ibid., Alison Jolly, pp373-4. (back)
5. See for example the paper by Daniel C. Dennett,
"The intentional stance in theory and practice" for an
appreciation of the "levels of intentionality"
necessary and implicit in social interaction, ibid.,
chapter 14, pp180-202. (back)
6. See for example a question responded to by
Andrew Weil at the first Tucson conference on consciousness: Toward
a Science of Consciousness, Hameroff, Kaszniak, and Scott,
editors, The M.I.T. Press, 1996, p687. (back)
7. The Thinking Ape, Richard Byrne, Oxford
University Press 1995, p178. (back)
8. ibid., p142. (back)
9. Katherine Milton, "Foraging behavior and
the evolution of primate intelligence", in Machiavellian
Intelligence, ibid., pp285-305. (back)
10. See for example African Exodus, Chris
Stringer & Robin McKie, Jonathan Cape, London 1996, p92-93 (back)
11. Self-Made Man, Jonathan Kingdon, John
Wiley & Sons 1993, p97. (back)
12. Steven Pinker, "Facts about human language
relevant to its evolution" in Origins of the Human Brain,
Jean-Pierre Changeux and Jean Chavaillon, editors, A Fyssen
Foundation Symposium, Clarendon Press, Oxford, ch17. (back)
13. ibid., p271. (back)
14. The Origin of Modern Humans, op. cit.,
p173. (back)
15. The Multiregional Hypothesis posits that an
early migration by Homo erectus from the African heartland
to the Near East, Europe, Asia, Australia, was followed by a long
period of regional and parallel development, with some
intermixing between regions, to produce Homo sapiens
quasi-independently in the various regions. Under this scenario,
racial differences, long thought to be far more significant than
has recently been shown to be the case by genetic analyisis, were
supposedly evolved during this at least million-year period. (back)
16. The first "Out-of-Africa" migration
being that of H. erectus 1.5 to 2 Ma. (back)
17. African Exodus, Chris Stringer and Robin
McKie, Jonathan Cape, London 1996, from the Preface. (back)
18. "Mitochondrial DNA and Human
Evolution" in Origins of the Human Brain, Jean-Pierre
Changeux and Jean Chavillon, editors, Fyssen Foundation
Symposium, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995, p 128. (back)
19. African Exodus, op. cit., p150 (back)
20. Ibid., p 150 (back)
21. The Origin of Modern Humans, Roger
Lewin, Scientific American Library 1993, p99. (back)
22. African Exodus, op. cit., pp 5-6 (back)
23. Ibid., p134. (back)
24. see The Origin of Modern Humans, op. cit.,
p99. (back)
25. "Chill Warnings from Greenland," New
Scientist, 28 August, 1993, pp29-33. (back)
26. Ibid., p31. (back)
27. "Sneezing while the Earth warms," New
Scientist, 24 August, 1996, p5. (back)
28. African Exodus, op. cit, p5. (back)
29. see African Exodus, op. cit, various
index entries under "Qafzeh, Israel." (back)
30. see the chart in In Search of the
Neanderthals, Christopher Stringer and Clive Gamble, Thames
and Hudson, 1993, p198. (back)
31. Quoted in Lewin, The Origin of Modern
Humans, op. cit., p128 (back)
32. African Exodus, op. cit., p186-187 (back)
33. African Exodus, op. cit., p153. Stringer
and McKie give the reference for the eruption as M. Rampino and
S. Self, 1993, "Climate-volcanism feedback and the Toba
eruption of ca. 74,000 years ago", Quatenary Research, 40:
269-80. (back)
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