Mushroom-munching poplar-popping Neandertals | Hacker News Reader

Mushroom-munching poplar-popping Neandertals

johnhawks.net

33 pointsdiodorus12 comments

This is interesting. Terrence McKenna[0] had some crazy theories about how we evolved and one of the involved mushroom of the psilocybin [1] kind. The idea was that these primarily grow on dung of herbivorous mammals. Since dung is used to track the game when hunting, our ansistors might have come across it and consumed it. It's been shown to improve visual perception in very low dosage. He also suggests the cave paintings of half game/half animals to be a byproduct of it. Of course, he had a nice theory but no way to prove it. But stuff like this hints on that possibility. Although much recent, this cave painting also suggests strong association with mushrooms. [2]

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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin

[2] http://erocx1.blogspot.com/2007/12/oldest-representations-of...

I had the same assumption that the article was going to be about psychedelic mushrooms but the article had not a peep about that topic, solely mushrooms as a macronutrient food.

Some mythology, some of which might even be scientific, is that below a certain IQ, generally representing homo sapiens, neither (serious) fishing nor mushroom gathering is possible or safe or sustainable but above a certain IQ those two technologies are incredibly useful. I suppose a good analogy is uranium is pretty useless until at least one culture reaches a certain industrial threshold and then it becomes quite influential in technology and geopolitics.

I wonder how smart neanderthals were, and how long they live if they eat random mushrooms. At some point it becomes evolutionary cheaper to evolve a smarter brain than to have stronger stomachs and livers.

Psilocybin must have been a very interesting experience for pre-historic cultures.

> I wonder how smart neanderthals were, and how long they live if they eat random mushrooms.

A lot longer than if they were eating random plants. E.g. of the 2,000 or so species of mushrooms in North America, there are maybe 10 or 20 that will kill you. And almost all of those are in the same three or four genuses, so you don't need to be able to identify a single poisonous mushroom to species to avoid being poisoned. There are few more in Europe, but not that many more.

Its easy to survive a 1% death rate per meal, for one meal. That's a 99% survival rate. But in the real world, you're starving, the kids are starving, thats a mushroom, poisonous of course, but maybe if we split it 30 ways among the entire tribe we'll all feel sick but each gain 10 calories...

The real problem with 99% survival rate per meal is there's about 1000 meals per year assuming about three per day, and (0.99) 1000 is essentially zero survival rate after a year. So just eating everything you'll be dead in a year. If you screw up the identification 1 time in 10, the survival rate drops to only a third or so. If I did the math estimates right in my head, for only 10% mushroom fatality rate over 70 years you'd need four 9's reliability in mushroom identification. To relegate the mushroom death rate to tribe-size-mythological rarity would take six 9's of identification reliability. As a smart homo sapiens I bet I could do it but sorting mushrooms into piles of "yum" and "gonna kill ya" is definitely the kind of tribal role I'd give to the tribe member furthest on the right side of the bell curve...

This is assuming a "white noise" distribution of toxic and non-toxic mushrooms, and lots of spherical cows. But I think its still a sound mathematical model that "tribes of dumb people" can't live off shrooms but "tribes of smart people" have an acceptably dangerous source of calories at hand, maybe enough to triumph in the long run.

Its very much like fishing. The odds of dying ice fishing once with the boy scouts in 2010s is incredibly low. The odds of dying if you feed your entire tribe all winter long for 70 years from ice fishing is disturbingly high unless you're a really smart fisherman. Dumb people who ice fish will drown and their tribe will starve, dumb people who don't ice fish will have their tribe starve.

I find it fascinating to compare ice fishing and mushroom gathering to today's attitudes toward nuclear power or car culture or aviation or chemical plants. It seems that extremely high stakes gambling in the lifestyle of "do it right near 100% of the time or everyone in the area dies horribly" is an incredibly ancient urge for our species, its hardly industrial or post industrial, a "savage" from 50Kyrs ago would totally understand our tempting fate with nukes...

This is the geometric distribution. The probability of surviving a meal with 99% survival rate is .99, two meals like that would be .99*.99, three meals .99^3, etc. So the probability you will have died by the n = 1000th meal would be 1 - .99^n = .99995683

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution

"if we split it 30 ways among the entire tribe we'll all feel sick but each gain 10 calories..."

Probably not as mushrooms are very low on calories ...

The thing you're missing is that many mushrooms aren't all that straight up deadly, esp if cooked or boiled. They do however cause varying forms of gastric distress and diarrhea. Given the lack of good water and medicine back then that could have been way more deadly than the "that one will obviously kill you" variety.

I have a simpler explanation.

You live in a wide cold and deforested steppe, have weapons with a limited scope and hunt big mammals for living. Your prey lives in ever-watching herds, can see you coming at day and can hear and sniff you at night, can easily overrun you and keep a safe distance at all times, and there is not a lot of places where you can hide and ambush them. Unless you can get closer without being detected and place yourself at shooting range distance, neither you nor your family will survive.

What a serious and committed hunter will do in this situation? They will use dung to mask their scent and adopt the scent of the prey and hunt at dusk or night. Even wolves do it. Dung could also have other uses, like recovering some salts after a strenous journey running non-stop after your wounded prey, and are used in many countries today as fuel source for cooking.

The presence of DNA from a mediocre edible mushrom in the mouth of a primitive hunter is a proof of mushrom contact, but not a proof of deliberately mushrom eating or recreational uses. The mushrom season is short and you could adquire this DNA by other ways. When you literally bath yourself in whooly rhino poo three or four times each month and process 'cow' skin with your teeth to make leather, there are plenty of mushrom spores that will be inevitably transferred from your hands to your mouth.

This is an interesting article on many levels. For example, I think it is interesting to see how technology continues to offer us new insights into old scientific conclusions. It was also refreshing to read a scientific article that addressed both sides of the debate with a fair amount of neutrality. To me, this seems to be the wisest attitude to have when walking the path of discovery.

A couple of other things:

1. Is "neandertals" a misspelling of "neanderthals," or an accepted variant of the word that I'm not familiar with?

2. "Mushroom-munching" may not be the best phrase to have in a headline. At first, I thought it was a metaphor for prehistoric fellatio. On second thought, perhaps that was intentional. I mean, I read it.

The name of the German valley where the first specimen was found was spelled Neanderthal until early 20th century. But it's Neandertal nowadays.

That's understandable, but here they are not talking about the geographic area (in its native language, no less) but about the hominid species. English (and other languages too) typically fossilize nouns. Take Japan, we don't now call it Jahon even tough in the native language p -> h. [nevermind Japanese interchangeably use Nihon and Nippon]

Given your interpretation I'm not sure which of us is the more innocent, but munching and popping are drug taking references.

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