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Comment by Litost | Hacker News Reader

Pretty tangential, and i've no idea yet as to it's accuracy, but i loved the idea that the human race's "emergence into consciousness was triggered by our ancestors encounters with visionary plants". From an ironically, as otherwise i probably wouldn't have stumbled on it, Ted Talk by Graham Hancock:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0c5nIvJH7w

Out of interest, are there any other theories as to what might have caused this "leap"?

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This is known as the "Stoned Ape Theory" and was (to my knowledge) first popularized by Terrence McKenna.

http://www.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/McKenna/Evolution/

From the link above:

McKenna theorizes that as the North African jungles receded toward the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the branches and took up a life out in the open -- following around herds of ungulates, nibbling what they could along the way.

Among the new items in their diet were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds. The changes caused by the introduction of this drug to the primate diet were many -- McKenna theorizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.

Here's one: it's not actually much of a leap. Save for the fact that your brain has a bigger language center, you're no better than any other ape.

There are numerous ways in which we're similar to apes and other organisms, and then there's also numerous things that have nothing even close in the animal kingdom(that we're aware of, anyways). So if nothing but a larger language center explains that, then it's a far bigger difference than you make it sound:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrCVu25wQ5s

If you're looking to say humans are categorically different from every other animal -- that is, that we have something none of them do -- then you're operating with such a level of granularity that it's necessary that you overlook small differentiating factors. The issue is not "why are humans unique, just like every species is unique" but "why are humans unique in a way no other species is?"

And if you take a human and ignore their facility for language, you will essentially have a regular ape. If you take away our capacity for culture and technology, you don't have an animal that rules the world uncontested. Whatever other differences we have are moot in comparison. (Take Stephen Hawking as an example.)

I suggest you watch the talk either way. It's well-paced, witty and above all extremely fascinating. It centers around both the things that we previously thought were unique to humanity(but discoveries have shown we're not), as well as the ways in which we are unique("why are humans unique in a way no other species is?").

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