All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
June 30, 2020 - Skeptoid
18:47
Skeptoid #734: The Stoned Ape Theory

Some believe that psychedelic drugs played an irreplaceable role in the evolution of Homo sapiens. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
The Stoned Ape Theory 00:07:38
Throughout the 20th century, many of the greatest creators have credited hallucinogenic drugs for their artwork or their vision.
In many cases, this has spilled over into advocacy for these drugs by citing false claims of other miraculous things they can do.
So we shouldn't be surprised to learn of the stoned ape theory that credits hallucinogens for getting early humans to stand on two feet and expand their brains and eventually build our world.
Just how valid is this theory?
The stoned ape theory is coming up next on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The Stoned Ape Theory.
Come back with us now to one million years BC as an early hominin treads across the dry cracked mud, spear in hand.
Finally, he spots the object of his quarry, a dry disk of manure.
He bends down and turns it over to expose its moist and pungent underside.
And there is what he seeks, a pair of stringy mushrooms, which he quickly peels off and gobbles down.
An hour later, we find him again stretched out in the grass, watching the sun and the clouds dance overhead.
And then at the faintest sound of a small rodent, strangely amplified, he springs to his feet and lets fly the spear.
Our young hunter has just demonstrated his ability, unique among all predators, to turn the power of hallucinogens to his advantage.
His tribe and his fathers before him have been advancing rapidly for millennia, thanks to what some of today's believers call the stoned ape theory.
Did early proto-humans indeed turn to natural psychedelic compounds to power some of their greatest societal and physical adaptations?
Well, there are those who believe that this is not just a part of the human experience, but perhaps the single most important part.
We'll get into an analysis of the validity of the stoned ape theory, but first it's appropriate to view it in its proper historical context.
Stoned ape theory is not an idea that came out of the worlds of cultural anthropology or archaeology.
In fact, you won't even find any mention of it in their textbooks.
The concept is really only discussed and supported within the psychedelics community, and even then, only since the early 1990s.
It's not a formalized theory.
Strictly speaking, it's really only just a loose idea, not really even a hypothesis, let alone a theory.
The idea came from the 1992 book, Food of the Gods, by psychedelics guru Terence McKinna.
Although McKinna is usually described as an ethnobotanist, he had no formal education or credentials in the field.
He began studying art history at UC Berkeley, but soon dropped out to travel the world in search of psychedelics, a journey that took him to Indonesia, the Amazon, and even a stint as a hashish smuggler in Tibet.
It was on these journeys that he developed his intense lifelong interest in hallucinogens, daily marijuana, and shamanism.
Most of his professional career consisted of illegally growing and selling shrooms in Hawaii.
By 1990, his reputation as a psychedelics guru and public speaker, he's often referred to as the altered statesman, was such that he was able to write and publish decently selling books.
Food of the Gods is where he posited that the use of psilocybin, found by fortune on the savanna, is what drove early man to think abstractly, to develop complex skills and ideas including language and religion, and to succeed biologically by becoming especially prone to sexual passion and to be able to focus intently on life-sustaining activities such as hunting.
The boundary-dissolving qualities of shamanic ecstasy predispose hallucinogen-using tribal groups to community bonding and to group sexual activities, which promote gene mixing, higher birth rates, and a communal sense of responsibility for the group offspring.
At whatever dose the mushroom was used, it possessed the magical property of conferring adaptive advantages upon its archaic users and their group.
Increased visual acuity, sexual arousal, and access to the transcendent other led to success in obtaining food, sexual prowess and stamina, abundance of offspring, and access to realms of supernatural power.
McKinna illustrated his stoned ape notion with a fanciful tale of a primitive boy on the savannah, his senses heightened by drugs, striking and killing a mighty lioness, and thus filling the bellies of his whole clan.
This example makes clear the way in which a beneficial plant, in this case a powerful stimulant, once discovered, can be included in the diet and thus confer an adaptive advantage.
A plant can confer strength and alertness and so ensure hunting success and steady food supplies.
The person or group is much less threatened by certain environmental factors, which may have previously limited individuals' lifespans and hence the growth of the population as a whole.
Even as the 19th century had to come to terms with the notion of human descent from apes, we must now come to terms with the fact that those apes were stoned apes.
Being stoned seems to have been our unique characteristic.
One of McKinna's most important assumption was that over a span of three million years, the brain size of proto-humans tripled, a growth spurt which he claimed scientists were unable to explain.
But he was.
He wrote, The action of hallucinogens present in many common plants enhanced our information processing activity, or environmental sensitivity, and thus contributed to the sudden expansion of the human brain size.
At a later stage in this same process, hallucinogens acted as catalysts in the development of imagination, fueling the creation of internal stratagems and hopes that may well have synergized the emergence of language and religion.
McKinna's tripling of brain size in three million years is roughly correct, within the normal variation of fossil skulls and the amount of time various species survived.
Australopithecines had brains in the 400 to 500 cc range, and those of modern humans averaged 1,350 cc.
Most people who retell McKinna's theory don't seem to have read his book.
They always say the brain size doubled in 2 million years.
But he actually wrote, At the end of these truly remarkable three million years in the evolution of the human species, human brain size had tripled.
And that's actually correct.
Once-in-a-Lifetime Adventure 00:02:28
As far as his assertion that scientists are unable to explain it, though, that didn't quite ring true.
The cooking of food to make it more nutritious, the appearance of the opposable thumb, and other factors have long been considered the driving influence.
And about the time McKenna was writing his book, anthropologists were cementing these ideas with what's known as the expensive tissue hypothesis, which provides a metabolic and biochemical explanation for how proto-humans were able to afford the greater energy requirements of a larger brain on the same basic energy budget.
by reducing the relative size of the gut, which became possible once food was being cooked to make its nutrients much more bioavailable.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Premium Diet and Brain Power 00:08:36
Animal models have confirmed this.
The brain and the gut are the two most expensive systems in the body in terms of the energy needed to make them function.
In nearly every species studied, we find a negative correlation between brain size and gut size.
That is, as one shrinks, the other grows, and vice versa.
How big the gut needs to be depends on the quality of the diet.
A high-quality diet means you can get away with a small gut.
Therefore, there's energy left over to power a larger brain.
A low-quality diet requires a larger gut to process, leaving less energy capable of powering only a small brain.
Think of a cow.
All it eats is grass, a terrible diet, virtually devoid of nutrition.
So it needs four enormous stomachs and a great long digestive system, all energetically expensive tissue, leaving it with a tiny brain.
Humans eat a far more energy-dense diet, allowing our digestive systems to be tiny and fuel-efficient, leaving plenty of energy to feed our great big brains.
Even rats, which are very smart, it's no accident that they forage for much more energy-rich foods than does a rabbit.
And so McKenna's stoned ape theory turns out to have been completely unnecessary to explain the growth in brain size and all the attendant advances which led to Homo sapiens.
McKinna's idea was answering a question that already had a better answer, just one that was unknown to him because he lacked the relevant expertise.
Something that should really jump out to long-time skeptoid listeners about the stoned ape theory is its similarities to ideas discussed in at least two other episodes.
The first and most obvious is the aquatic ape theory, another theory of human evolution proposed by people without relevant expertise.
and which also provided answers to questions that didn't need any.
First proposed by an expert on marine ecosystems and later popularized by a screenwriter, aquatic ape theory wondered why humans have no fur and can consciously control our breathing, and concluded that the most probable explanation must be that we used to be aquatic, like dolphins or seals.
This idea gained traction because TED let the screenwriter give a TED talk promoting it, in which she spouted all the usual conspiratorial complaints about why science doesn't take it seriously.
Enough that it compelled Animal Planet to base its fake documentary, Mermaid's the Body Found, on it.
Probably we need only start our stopwatches before the TV pseudoscience channels make a show promoting the stoned ape theory.
They're both examples of concepts developed outside of the relevant expertise and are thus as wrong as logic would predict them to be.
And yet, both publicized by media to seduce a general public hungry for sensationalism.
The second skeptoid episode that the stoned ape theory recalls is the one about the conspiracy theory that a cabal of industrialists, including William Randolph Hearst, was responsible for the destruction of the U.S. hemp industry, thus costing us a wonder product that is the best possible raw material for virtually any manufacturing need.
The parallel here is that we have two similar groups of activists who each favor a certain recreational drug, so much that they're willing to make up miracle claims for it that aren't true, but that they hope will sway others to their cause.
The marijuana enthusiasts claim that hemp makes the world's best fabrics, papers, ropes, and oils.
Therefore, we should encourage its cultivation.
And the psychedelic people claimed that magic mushrooms catalyzed an important step in human evolution by sharpening our senses and expanding our minds.
Therefore, we should encourage their popularization and use.
However, stacking on the false claims actually hurts both causes.
Marijuana is a very popular recreational drug with none of the harmful effects of alcohol or other alternatives, and it provides welcome temporary relief to some sufferers of conditions like chronic pain and depression.
These are valid and defensible arguments.
But when you add invalid and indefensible arguments, like it cures disease and makes better rope, your overall argument is the weaker.
The same goes with psychedelics.
Their general safety and perceived enhancements to creativity and insight are not disputed and can stand on their own as arguments in favor of the drug's use.
But attempts to augment that case with nonsense like they are the root cause of everything that separates humans from animals just makes the whole argument childish and silly.
To McKenna's credit, he did not claim his stoned ape theory was necessarily valid.
After the book came out, he always said he was just throwing it out there as food for thought.
And it's certainly an intriguing thought experiment.
But it's also a good reminder for those of us who have ideas that seem to be quite clever to us, that we should run them by people who know a lot more than we do in the relevant field.
Chances are there is something to learn.
It's when we only talk and fail to listen that we tread on dangerous ground.
And the stoned ape theory is an idea that rose from just such an environment.
We should learn from the observation that it is not part of anthropology.
McKenna himself did not have much opportunity to get this feedback as he died much too young from brain cancer only a few years after he published Food of the Gods.
No, it was not related to his drug use.
His most important contributions were to psychedelic culture, where he rightly holds a venerable seat.
And it's in that seat where we should probably let him remain, and not necessarily in the annals of anthropology.
For it is in those halls where we'll find instead our Skeptoid Premium supporters, people like Jonathan Cush, Dr. Jeff, John Pike, and Pontus Bookman of the European Skeptics podcast.
Sustainability is a popular theme in science, and the support from these premium members is what pays the bills of our nonprofit.
Please join them by becoming a member for just $5 a month at skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
Are you an educator?
Have you seen our Teacher's Toolkit?
It's a way to share all the best Skeptoid episodes with your classroom in a secure, organized, and controlled way.
Come check out our three-minute video explainer to see how it works at skeptoid.com slash teachers.
And while you're at it, check out our 40-minute movie, Principles of Curiosity, that teaches the basics of scientific skepticism and critical thinking in a far-ranging journey that takes you from the depths of Death Valley to the highest points in space.
It's free on YouTube and at principlesofcuriosity.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the Teacher's Toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX
Export Selection