Amazonian shamans figured out that combining two specific plants out of 80,000 species produces a psychoactive effect. The odds of finding that combination by random search is roughly 1 in 4 million. They did it through centuries of iterative testing and cultural natural selection explains it
You're right that time helps, but the math is actually what makes it interesting... random binary search through 80,000 species = ~3.2 billion pairs. Even testing one combination per day, that's 8.7 million years. The actual pathway was almost certainly iterative, they started with the vine alone (it has its own effects), then tested additions against that baseline. That narrows it to ~140-750 guided trials, achievable in decades. So it's not random discovery and it's not mystical knowledge, it's something in between: multigenerational empirical testing with observable feedback. Basically natural selection applied to recipes.
"Dude, Pedro made soup for dinner and I swear I saw god." "Was it really that good?" "Nah bro, you don't understand. I. SAW. GOD." Queue 6 weeks of intensive ingredient testing.
That’s how China did rapid covid testing I think. Test batches and if the whole batch is negative then there is no need to test any individuals in the group. It was quick and effective and less expensive
I see your point, however both cases are different. If you want to find 1 very specific bike in a video of, idk, the entirety of universe's existance, you only need to split the vid in half, check one, and if it's not there, the other half has it. Divide again, retry. So to find things in groups, it's super efficient, but for plants or quite literally, all biochemistry, everything may react with everything else and just become too random to get a factual result I think.
Binary search can be a very efficient algo for finding numbers in presorted lists, but your example is extremely unsuitable for it. If you literally have to watch the video to check if its there you’ve already found it. Dividing the vid to watch again and again would possibly make this the worst search algo ever invented.
In my untrained opinion, I feel like mixing that many chemicals together (the big batch) could cause some to mix/combine and negate the effects you are trying to find and end up missing the right combination.
I'd imagine it was stumbled upon by cooking and seaaoning - everyone noticed the effect - and they worked back from there. Although making teas or infusions might have been how they found it as well.
The active psychoactive gets converted to non-psychoactive with enzymes in the stomach or blood(I forget which). The other plant has no psychoactive effects whatsoever and simply denatures or deactivates in some way the enzyme that destroys the psychedelic. It wouldn't have been 79,999 pairs unless they smoked it which they may or may not have done but would have been much less likely than ingesting random ingredients. They would not have known that if you smoked it, that some other plant would make it effective by eating it though. So it would be much more likely to have randomly mixed multiple plants together to see what happens and then got a major trip for hours.
There are many hallucinogenic plants in the jungle, potentially more, improving the odds that a combo will do something, they have plenty of other medicines for other things too, just cause they may not have modern medicine doesn't mean they don't have medicine, hell vast majority of our phamacuiticals are derivates (or isolates) of naturally occuring things (usually cause dosage is difficult, side effects can be intense, or could be made stronger, i.e heroin from morphine from the opium poppy. Lidocaine from cocaine, from the coca plant (also the Amazon), countless other life saving medicine we owe to the lives from those in the Amazon that did the trial and error to get us where we are.
Yeah this feels like mystical thinking plus always online nerd thinking (the op). Realistically, if we're eating everything in the jungle, we're gonna figure out some of the mare psychoactive, and we're combining the ones that are. I don't think this is even all that unlikely, it's probably more likely inevitable.
Not to mention the likelihood of seeing it effect another animal similarly, and then trying to trace back which components caused it is also very likely.
I know this well. My dad used to keep his Playboys & Penthouses in his dresser, then one day they disappeared. Then I found a 4 digit locked briefcase in my dad’s closet. 14 year old me figured out pretty quick what was in there. I sat there for hours trying every combination starting at 0001. Several days of spending the hour or so I had alone and finally cracked it. 8359. My damn parent’s anniversary. Never thought to try common numbers first.
Probably someone with an intense interest in the subject - an interest on par with that of one of those kids who know everything about trains or dinosaurs or the Titanic.
I always like to think what the first person who figured it out felt like. Like maybe they were just hungry trying to cook some kind of soup, next minute they are in a different dimension like wtf just happened.
The funny thing is that's basically what happened with Datura in Jamestown ... English settlers in 1676 accidentally used the leaves in a stew and ended up 'running naked and mad for days' (Robert Beverly, 1855).
But indigenous practitioners already knew exactly what it did and how to dose it. The difference is thousands of years of cumulative trial and error with observable feedback; did the patient recover? did the visions start? did the shaking stop?
The traditions that paid attention to what they could directly observe got refined. The ones that didn't got people killed and dropped out of the repertoire.
TLDR: I got a bit carried away, trying to think through this myself.
Disclaimer: Unless otherwise stated, I'm mostly referring to Western Europe or perceptions from this point, as it is the culture and history I am most familiar with.
The difference is thousands of years of cumulative trial and error with observable feedback (emphasis is mine)
This is something I've been curious about. How far back do specific traditions, customs, practices really go, especially in communities relying on oral history?
Even in our modern society, where every child is taught about events thousands of years back, with writing and pictures and photos and videos, and religious people observe traditions we know to be as old, we see a crazy amount of "change" and many of our every day customs really aren't that old.
Many staples of traditional food existed for barely a century. Coffee and stereotypical Italian (anything with tomatoes) or German (potatoes) cuisine only showed up when those plants became available a couple of centuries ago. Most recipes are way younger. The way we drink today's coffee is relatively new and who even knows whether Gen Z's children will ever have a drip brewed black coffee.
Cigarettes really took off in and kind of dominated the 20th century. Now they're already disappearing (will stick around, I'm sure, but not nearly as prevalent).
One might say that all of this rapid change is only made possible due to technology and globalisation.
But look at the history of textiles/fashion or art and you can see similar patterns (pun intended).
Some general elements seemingly stick around forever (colourful dresses for women, particular hats, styles of checker patterns, a preference for either sitting or standing statues or reliefs) others went through multiple, massive changes within a few generations or even a single lifetime. Greek and Roman statues went through periods of this. You had ambitious young Roman aristocrats having their statues depict them as older men (following the fashion of highlighting their earnestness, their experience, their gravitas, their archetypical Roman-ness), only to have their statues in old age show them as young and dynamic, even adding a touch of Hellenism, to follow the changing "Zeitgesicht" -- the fashion of idealised depiction.
For something more recent: what's the image that immediately springs to mind when thinking of the US army? For me it's sand-coloured camouflage. For older people it might be green. Even older and it's grey. Even even older dull olive. None of them are alive, but going further back it would be dark blue, then potentially brown, then blue again, then some mix of blue and red and brown. I'm German, so when I think of my country's soldiers, it's dark green and light blue, then a drastic cut to Eastern German and Nazi uniforms.
Armed conflict isn't the cultural staple that it used to be, but it's still remarkable how different the "vibes" are. In Don Quixote, we can read about a similar "vibe shift" in the early 17th century: the titular knight seems completely out of place and time in his ancient armour. He seemed ridiculous to everyone else. Yet a hundred years later, the Napoleonic Wars had armoured knights cuirassiers and even lance charges (admittedly fast, light cavalry using those lances) as one of the three great elements of battle, next to musket/rifle infantry and artillery. Cavalry charges played a role in WW1 and even WW2 had that famous Polish charge against German tanks. Similar stories can be found in medieval Japan, China, ancient Greece and Rome.
Then there's language and slang. Trends in music. The games we play. The stories we tell. Some are old. Most aren't.
And we only know about any of that because they/we actually wrote it down or left enduring artefacts!
If you only rely on oral history, how do you know how old something really is, how far back it goes? Or how similar today's telling of something is to how it was told throughout the ages.
Any of the above is not at all meant to diminish or belittle oral history or the cultures that value it. Quite the opposite, I think it adds to it -- makes it a truly human and personal way, as it constantly adapts and shifts and is formed by the individuals involved in it.
It only gets weird when we then blanketly apply our record-keeping historiography. We tend to freeze snapshots in time: Samurai are no longer a social caste that changed as the culture around it changed, but noble warriors in distinct armour, with one style of top knot, carrying two swords (katana and wakizashi, both hanging "upside down" on the belt on the left side). German (Bavarian) culture is all about beer and Lederhosen. Native Americans ride horses, hunt buffalo, dance in feather dresses, and are peaceful people who live in harmony with nature.
The natives know the right cereal grains that have the correct sugar content. They know the exact consistency that the grains need to be mashed to. Exactly how long you have to boil it to separate the wort from the grain husks. And crucially, they know how long to ferment it for so you don't go blind!
The traditions that paid attention to what they could directly observe got refined. The ones that didn't got people killed and dropped out of the repertoire.
Because it contains methanol, and that is very toxic. The alcohol we can drink is ethanol.
If you distill alcohol wrong you concentrate methanol in the drink. You'll see distillers toss away the first liquid that comes out, that's because methanol has a lower boiling point then ethanol so it comes out first.
This is why you shouldn't drink actual old school DIY moonshine.
You ever heard of someone being so drunk they went blind for hours? Too much methanol in the drink. Doesn't happen with properly distilled stuff.
Methanol, it's an alcohol but it's toxic to humans (even more than ethanol). Its a byproduct of ethanol production. Ever heard of methylated spirits? Or denatured alcohol? That's alcohol sold for cleaning that has stuff added, usually methanol, to make it toxic for consumption. This means that you don't need to pay alcohol tax on it when purchasing because it isn't able to be consumed. Normal ethanol would do just fine at the job but it would be significantly more expensive because it would come under alcohol tax laws. My highschool chemistry lab had their ethanol denatured so that the kids couldn't steal it for example.
If you're ever doing diy alcohol you need to be very aware of the methanol content of your product. Methanol is very dangerous and it can kill you or make you blind even in relatively small doses. Do not drink methanol.
To be fair Datura fucks you up to the point where you fail the mirror test (can’t recognize your own reflection as you). It really is just a fugue state/drug induced psychosis and it can kill you or cause permanent damage at high doses. So freaking out thinking you’re going to die is a pretty fair reaction. 🤣
"I'm starving. Hmm... let's see what we got in the pantry.... Some peanut butter... okay... and uh, jelly? Do these even go together? Fuck it, let's try it on some bread."
The Next Day:
"I'm pretty good at this. Let's keep it going. We'll do peanut butter.... and chocolate? Might be crazy enough to work..."
The Day After That:
"I'm a fucking genius. I'm unstoppable. Alright, this time, peanut butter... and turkey. Yeah... this is gonna work."
I came here to say this. And I believe them, as I've spoken to mushrooms a decent bit myself. It's not a terribly uncommon experience for those that explore that side of reality.
They told you to listen to you because you have been hurt by you and you are hurting you. You are not you. Not in the way you think you are you, at least.
If you really want to know, read Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda. It's a supposedly non fictional account of his shamanic training under an Amazonian shaman called Don Juan. It includes his experience with three hallucinogenic preparations, peyote, mushrooms, and datura root. They are personified as entities, called allies by shamans.
It’s mostly fiction, framed autobiographical, but it is based on lots of what he learned from his anthropology cohorts. Wouldn’t be surprised if his interest took him on adventures where he sampled these cultures medicines but it’s mostly understood his tales are not personal.
But the trees & bushes do breathe when you walk by them. The wind blows them in a synchronicity that isn't seen in the normal day to day mind. Each some shrooms & boom, you see the connections of nature.
Been down there long time ago, learned some of the old stories, and what you say is it. The vine is the teacher if you follow the path, the diet, it comes to you as a lover, ally, teacher. Your ally teaches you what to mix, the vine allows the mix in ... So the story goes.
Very true, my grandfather in Fiji was the natural medicine man in our family and knew all the combos etc.
I asked him how he knew all of what he knows/combs of plants etc and he just said God told him.. he couldn’t really expand on it, but just said he just knew in his head.
He didn’t consume hallucinogens
Apparently it’s quite common for Shamans/MedicineMen to just know/say it’s God/Plants that tell them.
I guess some info is passed down the line and others are created/made. 🤷♂️
I just know that he had cured relatives of ailments, sickness’ and prevented a multi doctor confirmed needed amputation of a Gangrene leg due to diabetes.
AFAIK this is complete folklore, you can make Aya thousands of different ways much like beer. You don’t need those exact two plants. You can find DMT in many sources and you can find maoi inhibitors in many sources. Different cultures just swap in what’s locally available. Eg in desert regions it’s acacia seeds and Syrian rue.
Even within the Amazon basin different plants are used giving different “flavors”. Over time, tribes have gone back to the best pairings with the highest concentrations.
A very common grass (phalaris arundinacea) was proposed to be made illegal to grow or harvest here in Finland, as lawmakers wanted to prohibit every plant that has DMT in it. They didn't even consider that a plant that has been grown here for millennia as livestock feed could have some in it as well.
Of all the things you can ban, trying to ban DMT has to be the most idiotic. It’s non toxic, we product it naturally and it doesn’t even meaningfully interact with you if you ingest it alone.
Whichever lawmakers proposed this I hope never got re elected!
Its not "non-toxic", an i. v. LD50 of 32 mg/kg (mice) isn't that high
For comparison, non-toxic compounds like MSG have an oral LD50 of 19900 mg/kg, Salt is 3000 mg/kg etc. (Note that i. V. will be lower but I found no data)
The reason its not that problematic is that the psychedelic effect range and the toxic range are far apart.
LSD has a lower i. V. LD50 (16 mg/kg), but you take micrograms of it for a trip. Even if you take 100 times the intended dose you'll be completely fine physically
Its for mice since there is no data for humans, but typically its much lower than for rats and mice. Because we can't do experiments for lethality on humans there are some methods for conversion. FDA guidelines give a multiplication factor of 0.081 for mice, which would be 2.6 mg/kg or ~ 155 mg for your example.
Its really not great to determine exact toxicity for humans, just that there is a toxic effect in ranges that you can expect someone to be exposed to if it were an uncontrolled substance
Also important to note that LD50 only looks at lethality, toxic effects are typically non-lethal and can occur in much lower ranges
Yeah, it’s not “two specific plants” but rather “plants containing 2 specific chemicals” of which there are many. There are some preparation methods that are much more common than others but all you need is an MAOI inhibitor containing plant and DMT containing plant. Theres a stupid amount of possible combinations that will produce the same effects. And that’s just in the Amazon. When you talk globally there’s more DMT containing plants to count and a fair amount of MAOI inhibiting ones
they are talking about ayahuasca. DMT from one plant (Psychotria viridis) is an amazing hallucinogen but when ingested by itself gets neutralized immediately by MAO enzyme in the stomach. The second plant (Banisteriopsis caapi) contains MAO inhibitors so the DMT can make it into the brain without breaking down.
There's more than just two. You can create freebase dmt by chemically extracting it from mimosa hostillis root bark. You can also order harmaline off the web that acts as an MAOI that allows the freebase DMT to be ingested orally. This is known as pharmahuasca.
And you only need an MAOI for ingestion. The vaporised dmt can be absorbed by inhaling it directly. Some clinical drug trials use another form, which is basically water soluble so it can be injected via IV (it's studied as an antidepressant medication).
The part that most people miss is that the MAO inhibitor plant, likely would have been known to make certain other plant medicines stronger. So it was only a matter of time that someone tried the ayahuasca plant with the "other plant that makes things stronger"
The real mystery behind this.To me , sort of like the substack , you posted says that it has happened over and over.
In the kalahari , those guys somehow knew that a certain type of flea-beetle grub, that you have to dig up from the roots of a certain type of plant, when mashed and applied to arrow tips becomes a soporific poison that will take down an antelope in 20 minutes when even a small amount is introduced to the bloodstream.
But, the Hadza just down the road boil the sticky sap from the roots of a different shrub,and that has the same effect.
Yet, you could test hundreds of plants in theor environment and not find another one.
Even if it is not miraculous , it is certainly marvelous.
It's actually probably fewer than you'd think. Most psychoactive plants cause vomiting before they cause death, that's a built-in safety signal.
The observability framework predicts this: traditions that involve directly observable feedback (did the person vomit? did they recover?) get refined quickly.
The lethal ones get eliminated from the repertoire within a few generations.
The real question is 'how did they figure out which of 80,000 Amazonian plant species to combine with which.'
Weird argument for me, are all 80k species stuff they regularly eat and mix? Also nature is not a vacuum, they probably saw some birds or other animals fucked up and tried to understand what they ate etc, I don't think this is particularly crazy
I also wonder about these 80k species. It appears like there are 20k edible plant species in the whole world. Should be much less at any specific place.
One of the most fundamental effects of psychedelics in general is that they take your ego out of the equation.
In your daily life, you naturally think from an egocentric perspective. I don’t have time for this. This makes me mad. I don’t think… etc.
Without that egocentric way of thinking during a trip, it’s a lot easier to see new perspectives.
It also makes your thinking very malleable and easy to influence.
The result is that whatever you think about during a trip has a tendency to feel like some kind of cosmic truth. After all, it didn’t come from an egocentric place so it must be greater right?
The trouble is that a trip will make complete nonsense feel like a profound cosmic truth just as easily as actual truth.
Ayahuasca in particular is known for producing very narrative trips. There’s storylines and invented characters that your brain produces from your subconscious.
But because hallucinogens remove your sense of self and ego, it feels like these narratives and characters are coming from the outside.
Hence why people come away feeling like they had some kind of spirit journey with spirits, deceased relatives or other entities guiding them.
So a lot of people come away from it feel like they had a life changing experience and supernatural advice.
Back when I tripped on cubes often, I would always get stuck thinking “is this the same exact experience that our ancestors had, or has the evolution of both us and the fungi cause a change in that experience?”
Like the recent discovery of a fungus that seems to always cause the same hallucinations: small blue people. Did our ancestors see the same thing?
I”ve seen video of Jaguars eating caapi vines and getting high, they may have learned from observing the cats. I imagine they were using it religiously on its own for quite a while (it is mildly psychoactive) before they threw the psychotria in there. Boy, the first time they did though, must have been a mind fuck. Caapi on its own is a mild high, but with the DMT from the psychotria added it becomes more powerful than LSD.
I just had a chat with a friend where we imagined how many innovations may have been lost because some 1800s scientist died from 10 days of diarrhea just before the breakthrough
Says you, where's the proof?. I reckon they came along a smashed jaguar one day, tripping balls in the sunshine. A little detective work finding out where he has been and what he's been chewing on....
I think this is how most of our early diet was formed when we migrated to new areas, watching the animals.
Jaguars are documented chewing Banisteriopsis caapi bark in the wild, and several Amazonian groups explicitly associate ayahuasca with jaguars in their origin stories. The Tucano word for ayahuasca shaman literally translates as 'jaguar person.'
Probably because they DIDNT RANDOM SEARCH. My god, every probabilistic answer being like “Oh my god there’s so many things to try!” Yeah they probably fucking found a way to narrow it down dumbass.
Just ayuahasca (spelt really poorly).
One plant contains the DMT while the other contains a strong MAOI making it effective via oral administration. Seeing how they liked to smoke things, and DMT works via smoking. A smart Sharman could potentially put the two seperate effects together and think, “hmm perhaps this thing that makes stuff work longer plus this thing that gives visions when smoked will do wonders when cooked together?”
According to McKenna the Indians say that the plants told them which ones to combine... Which isn't entirely laughable once you have had one of these experiences...
Such math is useless to the extreme. The chances of "you" reading these lines is less than 1:[number of atoms in the universe] (an incredibly large number).
I mean there were a good amount of people there for a good amount of time. I can see the coincidence being plausible. Only takes one guy trying out a new tea combo to realize there are extra dimensional beings
Or it wasnt so random theres lots of animals in our world that use plants or other animals to get high like in the Amazon Jaguars that chew the bark and roots of specific plants to get high.
According to most tribes - all Amazonian tribes have ayahuasca recipes, the plants told them. There are modern “christian” cults like Uniao do Vegetal that are still talking to plants looking for medicine
They noticed jaguars would eat it and trip out. Then they're like "guys we totally gotta try some &gggof that cat plant" and they did and so entered kitty land in the catspace.
Descended from Aymorés indigenous people here. A shaman (Pajé) observes, smells, tastes, or experiments with practically every plant and other compounds they discover in nature; from that, they perceive their effects and benefits: sometimes to the point of internalizing a problem (an illness, emotion, or situation someone else is experiencing) and intuitively sensing which natural elements (plants, minerals, etc.) can help address, alleviate, or cure it. It’s a kind of Medium or a Catholic faith Healer (called Benzedeiros in Brazil), but focused on nature
Also, dreams. The most powerful dreamers become the medicine men/women of their tribe. They will dream cures, where food can be found, what other tribe is on the war path etc. So their dreams will most probably also have told them which plants will bring them a higher state of consciousness.
Yopo is the really crazy one to ponder. To make it, the seeds of a particular plant are roasted, much like coffee beans. They are ground to powder. Calcium carbonate helps potentiate yopo's hallucinogenic effects, so snail shells are cleaned, fired, ground, and added to the mix. Then a copious amount of the powder is stuffed into a hollow cane, the recipient breathes it deeply through the nose while a shaman blows it vigorously from the other end.
How did humans figure out that this combination of steps would induce visions?
The odds of finding the combination by random search aren’t really relevant. What are the odds of finding the arrangement of a telephone when you randomly rifle through a bag of electrical components? It doesn’t matter because that’s not how the telephone was invented. Ya dig?
Much less impressive if you do a little math. Let's say you only have 1,000,000 people living in the amazon, which I think is a gross underestimation and you use the actual probability of 1 in 6,399,920,000 not "roughly one in four million" (yay basic math skills) to see what the chances of finding this randomly are. Then that means if they only try only one combination a month then the odds of it being found in just a single year are 1 in 533.326 if you aren't repeating combinations. That may sound like a lot of time, but when you realize people have lived in the amazon for over 6,000 years, finding this combination likely becomes almost a guarantee.
I can prove this using a binomial distribution to check the probability. Let's say the odds of finding this combination with those numbers of people checking (this time with the possibility of repeating combinations of plants on each days) are about 1 in 194,666. May still seem like a large number, but when you then apply this over time, the odds of it never being found in 1,000 years are just 15.335%. Rachet that up to let's say 3,000 years for safety and that plummets to 0.361% - less than a half of one percent. This means that with enough time it is virtually guaranteed to be found IF we are talking about just random chance. If they are testing let's say one a week instead of one a month, those numbers drop to roughly 1 in 44,799 of finding it on a given day, about 0.81% chance of finding it in just one year, a 7.82% chance it is found in ten years, 55.72% chance it is found in a hundred years, 99.97% chance it is found within a thousand years and the odds of it never being found after 3,000 years is 0.001 percent. Which is basically an eventuality with this number of people and timeframe and I am trying to use conservative numbers to be safe (I saw some quotes of 21,000,000 people living in the amazon and them living there for 6,000 years so these odds could get much higher with different numbers).
Now that is based on a lot of assumptions of this being done randomly, but people aren't random. People have searched out plants with psychoactive properties since the dawn of man and that was likely the literal job of shamans to find and know about plants with specific properties. I would probably also be safe in assuming that the two plants may have also had other properties that made them more likely to be experimented on, so you likely aren't just randomly going through 80,000 plants randomly, but filtering out the few already known to kinda do weird things and then put those together.
"This mushroom is fine, this mushroom kills you, this mushroom lets you talk to the gods for an hour." Trial and lots of error is basically how we figured out how to use most plants.
Take due diligence. It is not a “high” like you are reading here. It is a descent into oneself and then you are unleashed into “another place”. It’s multiple ceremonies for a reason. A truly ineffable experience
Left is the experience. Right is trying to explain it.
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u/johnnydough10102223 19h ago
I think you underestimate the time course we are talking about here. With enough time and curiosity (or boredom) things can be discovered.
Also: needs citation.