One of the strangest, open questions about ayahuasca, is how indigenous people in the Amazon managed to figure out the formulation needed to orally activate the DMT with MAOI, given the ~50,000 or more species of plants in that region.
Perhaps this is due to European destruction of the native history of the Americas - they’re seen as primitive groups with little social complexity. I think that if their histories were better preserved we’d be less surprised that they had an understanding of the native plants around them.
One of the main reasons of why today everyone has a fridge with a freezer is because Clarence Birdseye, the founder of what today is Birds Eye (frozen foods company) was taught how to freeze fish under thick ice by the Inuit in Canada.
He then took the idea and developed it further using refrigeration equipment. Then they provided grocery stores with free freezers so that they could sell their products.
Then you have potatoes, tomatoes and corn. These crops were also developed by Native Americans. Without that effort, what you would be eating today would be similar to the teosinte, corn's wild ancestor.
Potatoes are responsible for a massive population boost in Europe. The reason is because wheat uses more land, requires more work and has fewer calories than potatoes.
Andean peoples had many techniques for dehidrating food... The word "jerky" comes from the Quechua "charqui", which means dried meat. They also employed freeze drying techniques to preserve food, such as chuño (freeze dried potatoes).
In addition to that, you have many varieties berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries), cacao (used for chocolate), vanilla, pineapples, etc.
But the variety you eat today is most likely the "garden strawberry", which is a hybrid variety developed in France by crossing Fragaria virginiana (from North America) and Fragaria chiloensis (from South America).
Other varieties of strawberry are not as popular.
Europeans did a great job further developing crops from the Americas. Italians alone bred tomatoes for every culinary purpose you can imagine.
You'll find similar outcomes throughout history and the world. Whether it's nationalism, communism, religion, tribalism or what ever. Us and them dynamics are constantly being created and exploited by various groups throughout our collective history.
No one said such actions are uniquely European or religious.
About ten years ago Utah was doing something where they were emulating herd movements using livestock which helped to create a lot of biodiversity both above-ground and below, which helped water supply, plant growth, really everything improved and this was almost entirely inspired by how native Americans managed land pre-settlers. I think was called something like the Utah grazing improvement project.
Haven't we done exactly that with alcohol ?
Wouldn't you stop after the first dozens of people trying different plants become sick or die? I know I would.
However, banisteriopsis caapi is orally active on its own: a brew of just the vine will change perception.
So it's an O(n) search to find the ayahuasca vine, then another O(n) to find DMT bearing plants (there are several), which go with it. A typical preparation of the medicine will have a dozen or more plants in it, with two or three recognized as "active" by the standards of Western pharmacology.
So it's plausible to imagine the curanderos adding a bit of this, a bit of that, as guided by the spirits (or intuition, whatever looked good, your choice), then hitting on the combination.
This might sound like I'm being dismissive of what was most likely a directed search for medicinal plants, which isn't my intention. Just simplifying and glossing over that part, to point out that it's a two-stage discovery, and you don't need both plants in a brew to start using one of them.
Then at that point some adventurous people may have just started trying combining it with every other plant they knew about and every future one they discovered, including plants that they otherwise believed had no effect. They probably would've stumbled upon a lot of interesting combinations.
And if they determined it had a strange ability to seemingly "unlock" "dormant" plants and if they spread that knowledge, maybe some people were trying it with absolutely every non-poisonous plant out there. And since DMT-bearing plants are pretty common (as you mention), multiplied across a whole society it may not have taken very long at all. And it would take just one MAOI plant for them to get the idea that other plants might have this unlocking ability, and just one DMT-rich plant to discover other plants might have similar effects, so maybe they iterated through combinations of MAOIs and serotonergics until they found one they felt had a good balance of maximal power and minimal undesired side effects.
So the bottleneck might be the first instance of someone ever discovering any kind of MAOI plant (this vine or any other). After that barrier is passed, I suspect it might be almost inevitable that something like this particular combination would be found pretty quickly (just blindly speculating, but potentially within a generation or two?).
> There is a bark of an English tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish and intermitting disorders. About six years ago, I accidentally tasted it, and was surprised at its extraordinary bitterness
One letter, which I couldn’t readily find, eventually reduced to “My lord, I had a tooth ache and was chewing on random things in the forest. Willow bark made me feel better”
[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1763.003...
It's a relatively new phenomena that the patient drinks the medicine. Traditionally, before Westerners, the curandero would drink alone in the presence of the patient. And earlier still the curandero drank a medicine derived solely from ayahuasca vine (banisteriopsis caapi). That is, the medicine did not contain chacruna (psychotria viririds) as it does today in order to bring about visions. It was not needed for visions and to heal.
Chacruna was added in the 1900s due to the impact of westernization in the region and the negative affect on the curanderos' natural connections.
So it isn't necessarily that a formula of two plants was magically discovered at the very beginning.
EDIT: add to this that when you cut the vine, a rich colored liquid / sap forms on the cut part. It tastes quite sweet. It's not a stretch to imagine the first person simply cut a vine, tasted it and decided to do an extraction in hot water.
Indeed, but harmal alkaloids - those contained in b. caapi - are not only selective, reversible MAOIs but also full on psychedelics by themselves, as anyone having taken a significant amount of them (usually either through b. caapi or a peganum harmala seeds tea) could tell you. You get "visions" with them too.
"How did my ancestors ever think of trying to eat X"? Well, they were dying anyway, so they didn't have much to lose.
My main message is, you and me are so incredibly lucky to live in this era of wealth, health and progress. We should try to appreciate it.
How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely?
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874912
Bottom line, it is trial and error, an evolution of ideas and culture over many generations.
Same question, really.
Anyway, they're not rare.
[0] that list looks a bit dodgy, how much maoi is in turmeric for example?
Also, you talk about naturally occuring DMT, but be aware that there is absolutely no scientific proof that DMT is contained in any amount sufficient to provoke a trip in the human body, even with a MAOI; it's there, yes, but in minute amounts and almost certainly as a byproduct of the synthesis of something else. Maybe you're right on the other hormones, but if that's the case it's not due to the MAOI properties of harmals either, since we're not seeing people using pharmaceutical MAOIs tripping.
A pregnant woman will often crave the foods that contain just the nutrients her body requires at the time. Has she figured out exactly what her body needs and what foods contain it?
In terms of material supporting the theory, google "pregnant cravings nutrients" and you will get hundreds of results... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5054961/ https://familyandconutrition.com/food_cravings_pregnancy/ https://www.webmd.com/baby/features/pregnancy-food-cravings#...
I wouldn't dare call it "she", "knows", "exactly", in the strict sense, but the less-than-conscious parts of a human should have a pretty good though fuzzy experience of what foods are beneficial in which circumstances.
Calling it a "disorder" and "largely non-nutritive" seems a bit broad, when it could be satisfying a particular need. Even though eating feces might not be a good idea and more serious examples do seem useless and damaging.
But what if there are many needles, and this is just the one that was found?
And once something is found, humans do hill climbing to refine.
They replied “the plants told us”