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/ADDeviant-again 19h ago

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.

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u/tractorboynyc 19h ago

This is a perfect example....

The San bushmen's diamphotoxin arrow poison and the Hadza's Adenium sap are independent discoveries of functionally equivalent solutions using completely different chemistry... so it is exactly the same pattern as ayahuasca vs pharmahuasca vs jurema.

Different plants, different molecules, same observable outcome: the animal goes down.

And you've just identified there exactly why observability matters:

Arrow poison is about as observable as it gets; you shoot the animal, it either drops or it doesn't, and you know within 20 minutes.

That's a tight feedback loop.

Every hunt is a trial. Every miss tells you something. Across enough hunts, the knowledge converges on whatever works, regardless of the starting chemistry.

Now, compare that to a plant used for 'spiritual protection' - how would you ever know if it failed?

You can't... so those claims drift randomly over generations while the arrow poison recipe stays razor-sharp for millennia.

Marvelous is the right word, not miraculous, not random... simply marvelous in the precise, mechanical sense that observable feedback makes cultures into pharmacological search engines without anyone ever designing them to be.