"The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of language. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish."  -Terence McKenna

In his book Food of the Gods: the Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, Terence McKenna crafts his carefully thought out theory proposing that our pre-human primate ancestors consumed psilocybin mushrooms for thousands of years, and this is the primary reason humanity’s evolution rapidly accelerated — launching us forward in the animal kingdom. Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory is more plausible than it sounds — especially in context of the emergence of human mind and language development.

As our distant ancestors left the forests for the grasslands and began moving throughout Africa after the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago, the species switched to a more omnivorous diet, which included psilocybin mushrooms. A variety of mushroom spores were found embedded in the dental remains of an 18,700 year old prehistoric woman. Researchers discovered microscopic evidence that the upper paleolithic woman had been nibbling “sponge capped, bolete mushrooms and gilled mushrooms from the Agaric group.” Thus, these ‘special’ mushrooms were definitively part of the stone-age diet.

In McKenna’s theory, the consumption of hallucinogenic psilocybin was done predominantly in small doses, where the effect doesn’t quite reach the point of hallucination, but instead reaches the point of heightened senses, such as visual acuity. This enhancement of vision would have helped our ancestors hunt, gather food, and detect predators.

At a medium dose, psilocybin acts as an aphrodisiac -- creates a sense of restlessness and sexual arousal. This would have increased instances of successful copulation, i.e. sexual reproduction which is the main game in evolution.

At higher doses, according to McKenna, in glossolalia-induced states of mind members of the group were inspired and compelled to use vocal sounds to communicate images to their tribesmen. The Stoned Ape Theory suggests that experience on magic mushrooms was the major contributing factor to the fast development of language during that period.*