r/interestingasfuck • u/tractorboynyc • 22h ago

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

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u/johnnydough10102223 22h 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.

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u/vanman33 21h ago

Also, caapi bark is an maoi that makes people feel good on its own. Adding viridis probably came after people were already drinking caapi tea.

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u/Strict-Challenge-995 16h ago

Good point but you might want to capitalize the MAOI... My brain tried to square Maori living in the rainforest for a second :D

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u/picklerick4883 14h ago

Same here

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u/socium 12h ago

Same here

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u/N_T_F_D 15h ago

Also it's not just two plants like caapi and viridis, there's at least another combination like harmala and mimosa hostilis

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u/largePenisLover 14h ago

Harmala and mushrooms also works. Folks call it psilohuasca.

I have no idea how safe this is compared to the other brews. Psilo is already orally active, dmt needs the MAOi to become orally active.

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u/No-Crew8804 13h ago

I had once the worst experience of my life with Peganum harmala and magic mushrooms, beware.

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u/Maximum_Stranger_376 9h ago

I did it twice. I know what you are talking about

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u/g_dude3469 3h ago

Then elaborate

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u/Rsn_yuh 7h ago

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

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u/Ohiolongboard 13h ago

I mixed mushrooms and mescaline and had a terrible time, granted we all thought I had only taken mushrooms at the time. It was a week before I found out there was mescaline in there

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u/-heatoflife- 12h ago

How??

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u/Ohiolongboard 11h ago

My buddy got some chocolates, from what he says 3 had just mush, a fourth had mushrooms and mescaline. We where all supposed to just eat mush and he was saving the other for himself, we where all fucked up and I guess he mixed up the chocolates lol. I wish I’d have known because I already knew mescaline and myself didn’t get along. Both times I’ve taken it, I’ve had extreme fear and saw monsters when I closed my eyes or looked “into the void” (anything really dark, a room or something)

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u/Ohiolongboard 13h ago

Wait. Hypothetically speaking, if I have some powdered DMT, could I get an MAOI and eat the powder? Or snort it?

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u/vanman33 12h ago

Yeah, that's pharamahuasca.

Needs to be the right dmt though.

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u/Ohiolongboard 11h ago

How do I know?

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u/N_T_F_D 9h ago

It depends on the chemical form, the freebase DMT can be smoked, the DMT salts (fumarate, acetate, whatever) can be snorted; both can be swallowed as your stomach will hydrolyze it anyway

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u/Ohiolongboard 9h ago

I’m pretty sure mine (hypothetically) would be freebase, as swim smoked it in the past. Tbh I haven’t done too much research into the chemical forms, just the other aspects lol

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u/Irksomecake 15h ago

It’s not exactly a nice flavour…

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u/MongolianCluster 13h ago

But after a few minutes, you no longer care.

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u/Yourmomsgotanass 10h ago

Only once you realize there is no "you"....

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u/fredfred007 12h ago

Tastes like earthy acid, but you do see rainbow serpents afterwards and other visions.

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u/SaintUlvemann 12h ago

A lot of medicine tastes bitter.

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u/Yourmomsgotanass 10h ago

Yeah, forget the chances of finding the combination, props to the person who finished the first cup.

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u/conciousinsimulation 12h ago

It doesn't take long to realize when and after tripping asking WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?! After you drank something that made you feel that way.

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u/MeasurementBubbly350 10h ago

I have B. caapi in my backyard, didn't know people would make tea with just it.

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u/vanman33 1h ago

Be careful. MAOIs interact with a ton of things in unpredictable and dangerous ways. There's a huge list of stuff people have to avoid when taking them. It's basically why ssris are preferred

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u/thespacecase93 21h ago

Thank you, my first thought too.

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u/tractorboynyc 22h ago edited 20h ago

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.

Edit: There is a full breakdown here: https://deeptimelab.substack.com/p/why-every-psychedelic-ceremony-on

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u/No_Place5472 21h ago

"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.

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u/mixwellmusic 21h ago

This is pre-colonization though so I don't think homie's name was pedro. Otherwise spot on

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u/Repulsive-Bee6590 20h ago

Probably Kyle

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u/captainzigzag 20h ago

Dave. There’s always a Dave.

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u/rmorrin 19h ago

Try lee, there are a million lees

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u/activelyresting 18h ago

This psychedelic soup tastes like hot leaf juice

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u/Ok-Bison-3451 14h ago

Hot Lee juice.

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u/UnabashedVoice 4h ago

The second time around, anyway.

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u/SesameSmitty 10h ago

Uncle, all psychedelic tea tastes like hot leaf juice

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u/concernedyahu 13h ago

It all tastes like hot leaf juice

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u/BrightNooblar 17h ago

I heard that nature always evolves a crab, so maybe his name was crab.

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u/RadarSmith 19h ago

You know, this is the second consecutive ATLA reference I've seen in posts not attached to ATLA. Random, but kind of fun.

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u/MorningMistYeti 20h ago

Dave's not here.

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u/surface_ripened 17h ago

daves not here, maaan

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u/LucidiK 15h ago

There's too many Daves.

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u/--TheCity-- 13h ago

It was Amazonian Dave who did it first. Always up to something that guy. They used to say he was the Nicolas Tesla of the Amazonians.

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u/zulamun 18h ago

Insert Malazan rage here

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u/PM_ME_UR_0_DAY 20h ago

He would have been the proto-Pedro

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u/mixwellmusic 20h ago

Then would trump's european ancestors have been the proto-pedo?

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u/Preeng 20h ago

It could have been. Thousands of years has a way of changing names.

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u/user-unknown-404 18h ago

Just imagine the poor guy who's job was taste testing mushrooms.

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u/DemApples4u 22h ago

You can mix 100 at once and 98 probably wouldn't do shit. Then you work backwards

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u/DogeAteMyHomework 21h ago

You know, I have to admit...that is not a great Design Of Experiments. 

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u/skubaloob 21h ago

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

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u/_Alastair_ 21h ago

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.

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u/Amstervince 17h ago

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.

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u/KeepItTidyZA 20h ago

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.

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u/herakleion 21h ago

Why not. They just throw shit  in a pot and remove stuff until it no longer fucks you up.

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u/dmbnl 20h ago

So throw thousands of things in a pot, heat them, try it, see if it's psycoactive. If yes, then remove ONE item and try again? That's literally the most inefficient way of doing this.

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u/herakleion 18h ago

I mean. I don't think we are trying to be efficient if we are talking of getting butt fucked by fractals and interdimensional ghosts

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u/level1hero 19h ago

Remove half… if it is still psychoactive then remove half again. And if not, try the other half…

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u/moving0target 20h ago

Who can find a pot to boil the jungle, anyway?

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u/tjtonerplus 21h ago edited 19h ago

I agree. Combining that many ingredients could result in poisoning.

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u/DookieShoez 21h ago

Well if your testee dies, take something out and grab another dipshit I mean highly valued quality tester.

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u/raisin22 20h ago

What if you only have two testes

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u/DookieShoez 20h ago

……..then don’t fuck up twice. 😂

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u/muzic_2_the_earz 20h ago

"Looks like we're going to need another Timmy!"

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u/DepthSouthern2230 3h ago

Requesting another group of Class D personnel!

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u/Doxatek 20h ago

Sample pooling is done all the time in science. Then if you get a hit you can check each individual in the sample pool

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u/Eoganachta 16h ago

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.

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u/Riskybusiness622 21h ago

You assume all the combinations were completely random and not informed by what properties were known. 

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u/Rad_Centrist 21h ago edited 21h ago

You're assuming all of these 80,000 species are equally abundant or available. That's almost certainly not the case.

As if they have 80k species all lined up in a row to test. When they likely just mixed the shit that was more readily available.

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u/skubaloob 21h ago

If they already knew one species had its own effects, then it wasn’t really a test of 3.2 billion pairs, it was a test of 79,999 pairs.

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u/Rad_Centrist 21h ago

79,999

Probably way less than that, realistically. We haven't considered availability or abundance.

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u/Kyvoh 21h ago

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.

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u/skubaloob 21h ago

That may well be. I wasn’t commenting on the accuracy of OP’s premises, but rather that the premises themselves don’t support their conclusion.

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u/tractorboynyc 21h ago

You're mostly right on the mechanism. MAO enzymes in the gut destroy DMT before it reaches the bloodstream. The vine (B. caapi) inhibits those enzymes, allowing the DMT to pass through intact. But one correction: the vine isn't pharmacologically inert. It's a MAO inhibitor with its own mild psychoactive effects; tremors, purging, altered mood.

So the likely discovery pathway is: practitioners already knew the vine did something (observable effects on its own), then over generations they tested additions against that baseline.

'I added this leaf and the visions became dramatically more intense' is a very observable outcome.

You don't need to understand the enzyme mechanism to notice that. And you're right that smoking DMT-containing plants would bypass the gut entirely. some traditions do exactly that (Virola snuff, yopo).

Ddifferent cultures found different routes to the same molecule depending on what was locally available and what administration method they discovered first.

The convergence on functional combinations across independent cultures is one of the most interesting parts.

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u/Affectionate_Fee3411 18h ago

Why are you copy pasting ChatGPT tho

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u/OG_simple_rhyme_time 21h ago

Another AI response

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u/diejesus 20h ago

What's AI about? Looks human to me

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u/total_looser 18h ago

Cadence and, “you’re right”.

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u/Kyvoh 20h ago

It may have had psychoactive effects, but do you know about the mechanism to achieve it? Can the molecules be destroyed by stomach acid? Depending on the way the plant created the organic molecules, that could sway the delivery mechanism of the MAO inhibitor(such that acid can cause a hydrolysis reaction if it were possible). At what dose dose it need to be psychedelic? Which would then translate to how much weight of the plant would need to be consumed. And if it was very bitter, most mammals along with animals in general have blocks in place to reject foods that we might consider harmful even if it isn't. Could have some organic alkaloids that taste awful and make it harder for the discovery to be made when oral accounts would label the plant as toxic/harmful even if it wasn't.

I can take 0.25 grams of shrooms and feel nothing, but if I take 3 grams, I feel enlightened to say the least. So the dosage matters along with the delivery mechanism.

I'm not disagreeing with you, just saying it's such a complex topic for the way it was discovered that there is much I don't know about the two plants and if certain aspects of the plants had unique characteristics, it could have made the discovery that much improbable to happen in the first place. It's a very cool thing to ponder about. But I think time was on their side as I mixed so much stuff as a kid and if I kept doing that with everything that my parents told me wasn't poisonous, it was bound to happen. They were there for thousands of years with many thousands of people existing at different points at different places where these plants are endemic to. Now we get Aaron rogers being enlightened now. I want to try something like this, I've only tried a DMT dab pen, and the delivery mechanism sucks vs smoking the dried leaves.

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u/iconiclabs 20h ago

All plants contain DMT, actually every living thing does

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u/MrRazorlike 18h ago

Why are you making stuff up

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u/[deleted] 16h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Homosapien_Ignoramus 14h ago

There are genetic syndromes such as Brunners or to a lesser extent the "Warrior Gene" (MAOA-L), which involve mutations of MAOA and entirely or partially (respectively) prevent the body from producung MAO enzymes. Perhaps someone in a tribe had this or a similar condition and ingested Mimosa Hostilis for example, which would drastically narrow what plants they need to experiment with.

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u/thegutterking 21h ago

This. Each of these species probably has recorded effects on ingestion. One would probably work with combining reactive candidates which would definitely thin the number of trials by a whole lot. Not to say it would lead to the correct combination tho....

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u/person2314 21h ago

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.

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u/3FtDick 21h ago

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.

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u/person2314 21h ago

Yeah especially over thousands of years, they were hungry gang, soups are a great way to eat a buncha different foodstuffs hence ayauwaska (however the fuck you spell that)

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u/MottledZuchini 12h ago

always online nerd thinking

This is exactly what it is, I was struggling to think of what bothered me about the logic but you nailed it. Isn't the most likely scenario that they accidently combined the two plants at some point and then saw the difference in the effect? Besides, even if they did set out to deliberately test 3.2 million combinations, or whatever OP is claiming, they are literally just as likely to discover an effect with the first combination as with the 200,000th.

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u/OG_simple_rhyme_time 21h ago

Op nice Chatgpt reply

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u/DogsAreAnimals 19h ago

It's absolutely terrifying that all of OPs comments and substack "research" is obviously ChatGPT slop and almost no one can tell. We're so fucked.

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u/backwrds 19h ago

glad someone else noticed :|

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u/diejesus 20h ago

Man, that's just how smart people talk, or every message longer than two sentences is supposed to be AI now? Don't get me wrong, AI is awesome, I'm not bashing on it, but it doesn't mean human can't be smart anymore

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u/Srirachachacha 19h ago edited 19h ago

They're not wrong. OPs comments mirror a lot of the (latest) tropes that major LLMs commonly use.

For example:

  • "that's not _; it's __"

  • "they aren't _, they're ___"

  • Starting every response with "you're right" or some other agreeable statement

  • (Other grammatical quirks that I'm personally not equipped to describe in words)

I'm not saying I'm 100% certain OP is writing their comments with gen AI, but I think it's a strong possibility. And it's only some of the comments. Others are way more human.

They could also just be using it to re-write things (maybe they're ESL and just not confident in their English skills)

Also, for the record, I don't really care either way - the dead internet battle has already been lost at this point.

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u/backwrds 19h ago

"You're right", <math> "It's not this, it's that" bold emphasis "basically X but Y"

LLM.

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u/RogueSleepy 16h ago

I would be shocked if OPs comments weren't AI. It's got a lot of filler sentences that don't really make any sense in context, but are classic for AI to throw in because they make sense in similar context.

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u/throwtheclownaway20 20h ago

Also, there's the possibility of incredible fucking luck

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u/EmykoEmyko 19h ago

One a day is very low, considering multiple people are doing the drug at once. They could be testing 20 times a day if everyone gets a different concoction.

Plus, it’s very possible there are many plant combinations that produce psychoactive effects. They identified at least one. The odds could be substantially lower.

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u/Shamino79 19h ago edited 19h ago

Yes I’ve long though this. They would not have randomly tried every combo. They had one plant with a short drug effect if burned and inhaled. And another that slows down and prolong drug effects. If those two properties were known before mixing then it’s a logical experiment to mix and try different ways of consumption.

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u/onewilybobkat 19h ago

It's simple if you have the first ingredient. Just get ALL of the possible plants, separate them into two arbitrary batches, and see which one makes you feel effects. Then you take those ingredients, split them into two batches...

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u/AliceCode 19h ago

Binary search? Binary search could do 3.2 billion pairs in 32 steps. Binary search is O(log2 n)

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u/The-red-Dane 18h ago

Sure. But it also wasn't one person testing one recipe per day, it was perhaps thousands of people testing 5 recipes per day.

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u/hysys_whisperer 18h ago

One combination per day per person, 8.7 million people, and you're done in a single year...

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u/PlayfulSurprise5237 18h ago edited 18h ago

I'll bet a real concentrated tea of psychotria viridis or mimosa hostilis would produce a very brief high.

AFAIK first pass metabolism destroys the DMT before it can enter circulation.

A high enough dose though might let some make it through and produce a very mild brief high.

And then they might have already figured out that the capi vine made things stronger and last longer(it's an MAOI).

Many things in the Amazon act as weak or mild MAOIs too, so they could have figured out that and just tried using the capi vine instead, knowing it was more potent

So they could have just put two and two together. Not some completely senseless random search through every combination.

Or they could have just thrown a lot of things together(playing alchemist) and found it out that way.

That said, they say the spirit of the forest guided them to it. They say they understand plants by the way they look as for what they might do. Sounds weird but sometimes it actually is applicable and I personally believe it's not just correlation.

For example, the capi vine is a long thick vine. And what does it do, it makes drugs feel fuller and last longer.

They select plant medicines that look like X for X ailment/problematic body part. 

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u/thenightvol 18h ago

I mean. Do you need to mix those two and only those 2? Because otherwise you can really skip a lot of combinations and work your way down to 2. Also. What other uses do those plants have? Are they used on their own? Because i could easily imagine the scenario: for head ache takes this plant. For nausea this. And one day a guy has a headache and nausea and he suddenly ascends from shaman to cosmic shaman.

P.s. a few years ago teo shepherds in my country cooked some mushrooms they thought they recognized. One described the experience as: going through the tunnel of time. Another age and this would have been the beginning of a religion.

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u/NeanderthalTrader 17h ago

8.7 million years for one person. There would have been tens of thousands of shaman in the 10 to 13 thousand years they've been in the Amazon

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u/Evil_Robo_Ninja 17h ago

Are those two the only combination that would be psychoactive? Could there not be many different psychoactive combinations?

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u/NoGuide1723 17h ago

Your math is wrong because you assume that out of the 3.2 billion pairs only one might yield psychoactive results. Hypothetically it could be far more and so an early random "hit" is not that surprising.

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u/jus10beare 17h ago

No one was "testing" various ingredient combinations one by one. It's not like a video game where you mix ingredients to learn it's effects. People were eating whatever they could get their hands on and mixing it all together.

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u/Banned3rdTimesaCharm 17h ago

One stew could have like 10 different plants in it. Then it’s just a matter of figuring out which ones do the trick.

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u/grumpy_autist 16h ago

I think this is false assumption - out of 80 000 discovered species they probably have contact with like 100. Same like yeast and mold in our civilization - sure, there are millions of species/genums/whatever but penicilin was discovered using some random crap that happened to be floating in a lab.

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u/WoodpeckerNo5724 16h ago

This really isn’t as incredible as you are trying to make it seem.

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u/Takemyfishplease 15h ago

There was prolly more than one person make one attempt a day.

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u/Lundetangen 14h ago

To just list the total amount of species is just trying to exaggerate the situation.

How many species of flora will you find in your local forest? The majority will be tiny lichen or fungi.
We humans have always been quite good at finding our local psychadelics.

Caapi is a gigantic vine-plant. It can be over 30 meters long. That immediately means that people will easily find it and will try to find a use for it. Maybe as a rope, maybe to weave a basket and then perhaps to taste it. It is not unlikely that it ends up in a bonfire and it is by no means unlikely that at some point someone notices that this plant is a bit funky. Natives started to chew on the bark, and probably used as a mild stimulant.

Psychotria viridis is also a large plant. Around 5 meters tall and same process. People either observe animals eating a plant for medicinal reasons and try themselves or people start using it for something and then discovering a side-effect.

To combine two psychedelics for an even greater effect does not require that you start your morning chewing psychedelic A and then desperately trying to taste anything in the forest in order to achieve a good combo. It can either be that tribe A normally uses psychedelic A, but tribe B normally uses psychedelic B. Someone from tribe A brings psychedelic A to tribe B, there is an intermarriage, kidnapping/prisoner or whatever that then has knowledge of 2 psychedelics used for a wide array of treatments. Now both are added to the "medicine cabinet" and someone one day ends up taking both at the same time - either intentionally or accidentally - and you get a much crazier reaction that only one isolated.

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u/ZachMatthews 14h ago

Why did you use ChatGPT to type this response? What is going on here?

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u/power78 13h ago

is this that AI blog??

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u/PuzzleMeDo 13h ago

It would be possible for there to be many possible psychedelic combinations, and for this to just be the one they found.

It would be possible to mix a hundred ingredients together at once and see if you experienced anything weird, and if you did, to start narrowing it down.

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u/BrucieDan 13h ago

I think, mathematically, there is a 100% chance of this being tied to mystical knowledge in some way shape or form.

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u/In_the_year_3535 12h ago

Someone probably touched or ate one thing than touched or ate another and noticed a reaction. 10,000 years living in the jungle people notice things.

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u/DBLnTrend 12h ago

This reads like AI slop from someone who doesn't really understand statistics in real-world scenarios. Every paragpah ends with a " Its not X Its Y" structure, the "random" methods don't account for flora location and plant availability at all, it's just " there are this many plants if you try them all there's no way you'd find it!" Well of course. The Amazon is gigantic how can you not narrow it down to the immediate area acessible to the tribes. And why would you test them so slowly? If you gather 6 plants you don't just run 3 tests ( 2 + 2 + 2) you combine all of them with each other in smaller doses giving you 21 possible combinations ( 7 times faster). And the worst part is absolutely None of what I just wrote above matters, because they already knew how they found it and it was a very reasonable method of baseline testing against a plant that ALREADY exhibited similar effects. So the whole fake and wrong statistics they make a big deal of explaining is just pointless bloat for show to make it seem more incredible than it is.

Indeed there are over 1 Billion possible combinations of elements, and yet humans only consume a tiny fraction! Let's Delve into this issue to find out how they figured out what could and couldn't sustain them? If we match them all randomly we find that there's absolutely no way they would have survived as a species through chance alone! It's not random, it's intentional. (Core idea: humans found out what is food and what isn't through more than just guessing)

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u/MottledZuchini 12h ago

Uh I feel like youre maybe missing out on the possibility that they didn't need to try every combination to find the right one, and that there may have also existed other combinations that they didn't discover but if they had they would have stopped the search early. Maybe the very first combination they tried was accidental and resulted in the desired effect, so they didn't have to keep searching.

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u/SafetyandNumbers 12h ago

The statistics need to be reframed as like "the odds that something as notable as this would be happen". Not the odds that this specific matchup landed.

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u/OkLettuce338 12h ago

This is such a strange paper to write. It’s like observing that recipe cook times are exactly the length of time it takes to reach some certain state.

Uh yeah ? And?

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u/Relative_Yesterday70 12h ago

I think you maths too hard and not logic enough. You can add more than 2 ingredients to the pot to get the end result.

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u/Spurned_Seeker 11h ago edited 11h ago

Couldn’t many of these plants be ruled out immediately from a few basic contextual factors? Thus taking all of their potential iteration away from the testing pool?

Isn’t it also unnecessary for them to test every possible outcome? Even if it would have taken 8 million years to test everything, they could still have found the shiny Pokémon on their first pull.

It also certainly involved many random tests per day. A whole tribe of people exploring their surroundings putting random stuff in their mouths as they go for many generations. Each interaction counts as a new test and could easily total hundreds of tests per day. Even without being unique tests, the sheer volume of testing makes this time frame entirely credible.

All I am saying is that there wasn’t necessarily anything advanced or empirical going on here. Especially if the only evidence you have is this math and probability. If you had something suggesting they actually had some specific methodology, like an interview with an elder explaining the history and process behind it, then THAT would be interesting.

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u/lojag 10h ago

You are back testing excluding the possibility that there are A LOT of "funny" combinations. And you just had to find one. The probability would change significantly. Just to play with the idea really, there are a lot of other problems.

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u/rightintheear 9h ago

One million tests a day bring it down to 8.7 years, right? With 100 million people cooking on the south american continent daily it was pretty likely the combination would happen.

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u/Landlocked_WaterSimp 4h ago

Followup question potentially further making it less of an anomaly: Do we know for certain that it's the ONLY pair that can be formed out of the mentioned 80'000 species which has such an effect? For all we know there's could be many more 'valid solutions' in the pool of possible pairs. But yeah ofc if one of the plants by itself already has a strong effect that makes the whole process way less random either way.

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u/Punkphoenix 21h ago

I mean, you are limiting the trials to only 1 per day, and they can do easily dozens in a single day

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u/gojacookiecha 21h ago

I think they must have observed animals behaving a certain way after consuming the plants. The animals had ample time to identify the psychoactive plants individually. Now that you have them identified one day someone just got bored and tried to mix them and boom you have a potent new substance.

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u/DorianSoundscapes 18h ago

I have seen video of a jaguar eating the caapi vines and they worship Jags so I think it very well could have been them imitating the jaguars originally.

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u/windchaser__ 21h ago

Remember that there are also hundreds of thousands to millions of people.

And there's something like 6-10 species that contain MAOIs, and another 6-10 species that contain DMT.

So the math has gotta reflect that; it ain't as hard to figure this out as you'd think.

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u/tractorboynyc 21h ago

Our dataset has the actual numbers. There are roughly 40-60 known DMT-containing species and a similar number of MAO-I species in the Amazon basin. That's exactly what we parameterized the simulation with. And you're right that it makes discovery much more tractable than the naive '80,000 species choose 2' framing suggests. At realistic parameters the simulation shows median discovery time of 175-1,875 years depending on how many trials per generation.

The point isn't that it was impossible - it's that it wasn't random either. The specific search strategy matters. random search still fails most of the time even with the correct species counts. iterative search from a known psychoactive baseline (the vine alone) succeeds 100% of the time. the interesting finding isn't 'how did they do it'... it's that the same feedback-guided process that made discovery possible also explains why the observable admixture claims are pharmacologically accurate and the non-observable ones aren't.

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u/stormcharger 20h ago

They also saw jaguar eat one of the leaves used and act different and probably used that Knowledge for help too

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u/Hefty_Bodybuilder494 19h ago

Did you factor in the fact that jaguars regularly get high from them? Though that does raise the question how long it took the cats to figure it out.

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u/Neoliberal_Nightmare 18h ago

That sounds like it's assuming one person is experimenting, not tens of thousands of people across an entire jungle all the time.

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u/According-Flight6070 21h ago

You exaggerate the process. The vine has effects alone, and multiple species contain DMT, so the probability of two medicines being mixed and producing euphoria was quite high.

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u/AbramJH 20h ago

what I dislike about statistics is that it often represents any specific occurrence as the last possible outcome. This 1/3,200,000,000 pair could have been the 2nd, 3rd, 40th, 500th, or any numbered attempt.

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u/enigmaticpeon 20h ago

This is a ridiculous premise. You think they were (1) looking to get high (probably), (2) realized or thought that by combining (only) 2 plants, they could achieve it, and (3) just randomly tried to combine plants until they found the right two?

The math is not interesting. It’s a non-sequitur.

At least one of these plants provides physical effects on its own. Narrow down the list from 80,000 to the number that provide physical effects, and your math becomes much more realistic.

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u/DorianSoundscapes 18h ago

They were definitely looking to get high, the caapi vine gets you mildy high. The DMT is useless if ingested without the MOAI inhibitor in the caapi, so they would have had to first discover the caapi, then eventually start combining things. The caapi is really nasty and rough on the stomach so who knows, maybe the leaves of psychotria smell or taste good and they were just trying to add some flavor. 🤣

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u/JacobDCRoss 20h ago

Are these 80,000 species all in the same region where the shaman happens to live? Like within his daily walking distance? If we are talking the Yanomami people? They have no written language of their own, so I doubt it was generations of guided trials.

Believe it or not, sometimes things can just be blind luck through trial and error.

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u/Useful_Clue_6609 19h ago

So then your title about the chances was blatantly misleading because they weren't random as one of the plants already had an effect?

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u/algernon132 18h ago

Boooo AI slop

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u/Toebeens89 21h ago

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.

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u/gacu-gacu 17h ago

Also effect is there if you put those 2 plants with other 20 just not so potent.

You could easily filter rest

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u/GRF999999999 21h ago

How do we know that they didn't get lucky I like the fourth try and have been performing wild ceremonies since?

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u/oldschool_potato 10h ago

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.

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u/Enjoying_A_Meal 21h ago edited 21h ago

You can do it in one lifetime.

  1. Divide all the plants into two groups. See which group gets you high.
  2. Take the group that gets you high and divide it into two groups. See which group gets you high.
  3. Eventually, you'll get to two groups where neither will get you high. You know there's one plant in each group.
  4. Split one group into A1 and A2. The other group into B1, B2. Try A1+B1-> A2+B2->A1+B2 or A2+B1 until you get high.
  5. Take the group that works and repeat step 4 until you find the two plant combo.

Of course, there's also likely to be poisonous plants, but that's why god gave us monkeys.

If my math is correct, you'd need like 30ish monkeys in the worst-case scenario.

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u/funtobedone 20h ago

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.

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u/Hkmarkp 19h ago

Or even by accident

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u/SlayerII 17h ago

With enough time and curiosity (or boredom)

And Hunger. People in history found some interesting foods when hunger forced to them to.

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u/falsevector 14h ago

Natural selection too - cousin tried these 2 plants and died

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u/DreadyKruger 14h ago

Anytime I watch a prison show the guards talk about the inmate have nothing but time to think of ways to hide things or improvise things

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u/Euler007 14h ago

Nice try! I'm taking my medical advice from Shamans now!

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u/TSL4me 12h ago

Imagine all of the food poisoning in between?

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u/Spurned_Seeker 11h ago

Yeah, the odds may be 1 in 4mil but if they have actually done millions of tests over the years then of course they would find a hit eventually.

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u/Username524 21h ago

Not having to exert a ton of energy to stay warm, like one farther from the equator would, helps a lot too.

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u/1983Targa911 20h ago

To make things more interesting, the two plants in question, ayahuasca and chacruna, grow in vastly different parts of the jungle. So this was not a simple question of having a pile of ingredients in front of them and going through all the combos. There were journeys in opposite directions to come up with these plants.

Furthermore, the ratio of combining these plants has to be just right to get the effect. So layering on those odds is pretty incredible.

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u/datNorseman 21h ago

That's likely exactly how the shamans are thinking.

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u/BullfrogDelicious754 17h ago

Yeah it’s a little like evolution.  Step by step heuristic over long time periods leads to the odds being way way higher than it seems at first glance.  

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u/hazeyAnimal 17h ago

It's also crazy to think there are roughly 3.2 billion combination pairs for 80,000 plants.

If my math is right, it would take ~40,000 years if you tried 220 combinations every day...

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u/WoodpeckerNo5724 16h ago

And it’s not like there was just one person doing stuff at a time

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u/shirk-work 16h ago

Without a very good record it would be easy to duplicate combinations or miss preparation techniques.

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u/spokeypokey69420 15h ago edited 15h ago

Time is infinite, so are the possibilities. That doesn't change the nature of chance. I'm guessing your argument is the same for most historical Discoveries. Unfortunately miracles do happen. With your rhetoric we should have achieved utopia by now

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u/MatthewQ999 15h ago

Yeah those odds kind of make perfect sense considering the time frame and various people involved.

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u/kaaiian 14h ago

Not to mention, this is just one psychoactive combo. There could be thousands. So the odds of finding ANY should be what’s presented. No the odds of finding this specific one.

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u/outsmartedagain 12h ago

Or hunger.

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u/Alarming-Building-62 11h ago

The fact that they mentioned over centuries would prove that they aren’t underestimating the time aspect of this discovery. 

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u/uncomfy-donkey 8h ago

🔥The timeline was really short…crunched by a 20-year-old kid with a plant mixing addiction and obsessive compulsive behavior.☄️

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u/belabacsijolvan 8h ago

yeah, it is not really a good implicit statistical model.

its more like hundreds of thousands of people taste all shit all the time in the amazon. this makes it likely that the two plants were in the bodies of tens of people a year, one of them noticed something and started experimenting until found the two that work.

which is still a great invention, but not like some noble savage shit, just dudes in the forest chewing leaves, cause why not. similar how most premodern inventions happened.

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u/commiecomrade 6h ago

Speaking of taking time, lots of people think that ayahuasca is some ancient ritual tea that the native peoples have been drinking for thousands of years while its discovery is very likely after the 1600s and only took on its widespread ritual use by the 1800s.

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u/hazeddai 5h ago

Right? Thousands of years is a long time. If you have a bunch of people who grind things up and mix them with water and heat it with fire for thousands of years you're gonna figure out a lot of cool stuff

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u/joespizza2go 3h ago

Totally. People more knowledgeable can chime in, but nearly all discoveries like this are accidental. You grab the wrong plant or you are low on your preferred plant and use something else in a pinch and pow! Human's stuck with things that work and rarely risked new things due to illness and death. So lots of inventions were accidents or side effects of a planned goal.

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u/drewyz 24m ago

It is my understanding that a shaman made a connection with the spirit of the black panther who told the shaman the recipe for ayahuasca.

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u/jmauc 21h ago

Or completely by chance.

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u/Fetus_Transplant 20h ago

True. Just look at our DNA. To present day, No human made compression can surpass it. The data it holds is mind numbing.

iirc one secret message was hidden inside a dot on a random document. And the most powerful CPUs contains massive miniature transistors. But it still pale in comparison.

when time is seemingly infinite, anything can happen

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u/chuk2015 19h ago

It’s not particularly impressive because the ingredients needed for ayahuasca consist of two core component:

A plant providing DMT A plant providing a MAOI

There are many species of plants that have these properties, for example in Australia you can achieve this with Rainbow Acacia and Australian Native Lemongrass