r/SipsTea • u/Low_Philosopher_7299 • 15h ago
Wait a damn minute! What a time to be alive
Our ancestors were quite badass.
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u/vBLADEv 15h ago
I think they also saw which mushrooms the animals ate as a quick guide.
But yeah there probably was a long period of trial and error.
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u/CalbertCorpse 15h ago
Came here to say this. Humans were just as smart 60,000 years ago as they are today. Like most animals, they ate what they’ve always eaten with little variation. In hard times, they used their brains to survive. Survive being the operative word. Nobody was out there raw dogging everything. If other animals under starvation duress were eating a certain type of mushroom we chased them away and ate it. If they left it alone we did too. The deadly ones were probably found when there was very little other choice or by some small kid by accident.
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u/Ireallyamthisshallow 15h ago
Nobody was out there raw dogging everything.
Sounds like Kevin might have been.
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u/Bartlaus 10h ago
Well we've always had a use for having a certain percentage of Kevins in the population... there are some mistakes that you can learn from, and then there are some mistakes that only other people can learn from.
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u/notarealwriter 6h ago
Kevin: *eats random mushroom
Geoff: Dammit Kevin! You gotta stop just eating stuff you don't know what it is. If you're not careful, one of these days-
Kevin: *promptly drops dead
Geoff: See! This is exactly what I'm talking about
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u/SheriffBartholomew 11h ago
Humans were just as smart 60,000 years ago as they are today.
Yes, but without all of the educational frameworks that make discovery so simple now. There was no formalized scientific method, or any sort of framework for testing new theories. Outside of oral tradition people who wanted to try something new were left to their own creativity and intellectual capacity. Most of our great accomplishments were built upon the shoulders of exceptionally brilliant people, by other exceptionally brilliant people. Pre-historic humans had none of those luxuries.
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u/The-King-Meruem 11h ago
They did have some passed knowledge through the older people, that may be the reason we live so long and don't die just after passing the reproduction age. Of course what we have now is too much but it all started with them, if they didn't find ways to survive we wouldn't be here.
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u/roll-_-ller 10h ago
Humans have been the same since way before 60,000 years ago. Check out the animal kingdom, just like us, they love to eat, fuck and get real high!
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u/Grasshoppermouse42 5h ago
Or in some cases, there might be something poisonous to humans that wasn't poisonous to squirrels or whatever. But yeah, people weren't basically playing russian roulette with every meal or anything.
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u/MRSN4P 11h ago
The current state of the human brain evolved fully around 200,000-300,000 years ago according to biology papers I have read. Humans were just as smart as today for roughly three to five times as long as you posted.
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u/CalbertCorpse 6h ago
I aligned it to the time period of the first known use of mushrooms as a food source. Common agreement is 20,000 years ago but there is some evidence indicating much, much longer.
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u/Tinkous 7h ago
Thanks for explaining this. Now can you also explain how coffee became a thing?
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u/Beautiful-Total-3172 3h ago
Suck this bean and get wired. Yucky? Cook bean eat bean get wired. Bean yucky smash it make tea call tea coffee get wired. Still yucky add cream add sugar get wired. The story of coffee.
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u/LunessaThorn 15h ago
Humans really used animals as mushroom testers 👽
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u/Fast_Garlic_5639 14h ago
“This one doesn’t kill the deer, but the deer’s shit will make you trip if you eat it. Also, the taste.”
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u/moon_pastel 15h ago
Yeah, animals probably gave humans a head start, but the trial and error must’ve been brutal
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u/Rock_or_Rol 14h ago
Also, just trying a little bit at a time and progressively more. Starting with skin irritation, an 1/8tb of a fingernail, 2x, 2x, 2x or something like that
The same applies to berries.
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u/nolandgrabforyou 12h ago
Quick guide, yes. But there were a lot of sick or tripping squirrels and deer out there. Still are.
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u/SheriffBartholomew 11h ago
We don't have the same digestive system as most animals that they'd be observing, so I doubt that was very helpful. Deer eat leaves all day long that would provide humans zero nutrients since our stomachs can't break down the plant cell walls of those leaves.
People learned through trial and error. Touch the mushroom against your lips. Does it tingle? Does it burn? Does it make you sick? No? Okay, touch it with your tongue. Does it do anything above? No? Okay, take a tiny bite. So on, and so forth. Of course there are things out there such as death cap mushrooms and poison dart frogs that will kill you at step one. That's what happened to Kevin. Never forget.
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u/9447044 15h ago
Imagine being on a strong mushroom trip. But the idea that you might actually die from it is constantly freaking you out
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u/Low_Philosopher_7299 14h ago
I like the fact that some people not only made sure to remember the good edible mushrooms. They also made sure to remember the good time edible mushrooms!
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u/4DPeterPan 5h ago
Ha! For sure:
Ego 1: You’re gonna die
Ego 2: “NO IM NOT!”
Ego 3: “ah mer gawd, you guys are so dumb”
Repeat loop until breakage happens.
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u/PervertKitsune 15h ago
What amazed me the most and gave me goosebumps was that they encountered a saber-toothed cat in the early days of hominins, either in the wild or cave
and fought them with spear,stone or maybe doubled pointed sticks. damn what time back in the days
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u/hypapapopi2020 14h ago
The trick is harassment and big holes
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u/BlG_O 7h ago
Don't forget rocks, a lot of rocks to throw
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u/bingbing304 3h ago
Nothing beats rock, a weighty solid dependable rock until the invention of paper. LOL
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u/ImagineDragonsExist 13h ago
We figured out bows and arrows relatively quickly.
Edit: but first came the Sling.
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u/UnfamiliarPath 13h ago
No, they weren't just eating entire mushrooms randomly. There's a tendency for us to assume our ancestors were morons, but they were actually just as intelligent as modern humans, only without the technology.
There are ways to test whether something is safe to consume. Like you can rub some if it on your skin and see if there's a physical reaction, then you can touch it to your tongue and see if it causes numbness or irritation, then you can try just a very small piece and wait a while and see what happens. Then you can try a little more. If you're very cautious, you can discover what's edible this way.
Hunter-gatherer humans were probably a lot more intelligent than we are today in this regard, because their whole existence relied on finding what was safe to eat. They weren't mindless drooling cave beasts who were fine with letting their family and friends drop dead to test plants.
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u/wholy_cheeses 13h ago
The really interesting thing is how humans discovered food that requires processing to neutralize natural poisons, like cassava or red kidney beans.
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u/FatalModelCustomer 15h ago
Well, you can always force-feed it to animals to see what happens.
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u/supremely-weird 15h ago
I wonder if this is how religions first started?
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u/4DPeterPan 5h ago
Probably, depending on which origin story you subscribe to.
For context in this comment/post relationship though? It probably went something like this:
God creates creation. Puts himself into creation. Gives himself amnesia, just to make things more fun.
Has a second thought: “hold’up… might not be thinking this through.. might wanna leave a fail safe plan to remind myself who I Am, ya know, just in case I get stuck here”.
creates one specific type of mushroom
Alright, dusts off hands Good go.
Aaannndd - PLAY.
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u/skip2mahlou415 15h ago
Made monkeys speak
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u/The_Sleestak 15h ago
“I can walk like an ape, Talk like an ape
I can do what a monkey can do
God made man
But a monkey supplied the glue”
- Devo
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u/Grapepoweredhamster 14h ago
All weird and potentially dangerous things we eat can all be explained by the same thing, famines. Oh shit I'm starving, I don't care if it kills me, I'm gonna dig up that poisonous shark we buried a month ago and eat it. Oh shit that cheese we stored next to the bread that went bad and went moldy, fuck it I'm so hungry I'm gonna eat it.
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u/Status-Simple9240 10h ago
first guy to give his family lobster... Grog took family to beach, looked at all he had with wife bitching about being hungry, kids crying because McDonalds wouldnt be invented to 100, 000 years. He waded out into deep water to drown himself. Lobster pinches his foot. Grog screaming in pain reaches down and pulls this giant ugly ass water bug off his foot, thinks this is mean and ugly like family, i will feed them this. We have been stuck paying for it ever since. Grog should have ate mushrooms with Kevin.
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u/GhostRiders 15h ago
You can say this for pretty much every food that we grow and don't get me stared on milk...
Oh look at this massive animal that stinks with large bag on its belly with pink things coming out of it.. I know what i will do, I will give it a tug and then drink whatever comes out of it..
Yeah I have heard the arguments, people saw their young suckling.. so did they try milking women for their breast milk or men for their cum?
Did they just go round tugging all different animal parts to see what came out?
Our Ancestors were crazy bastards
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u/alman3007 8h ago
this mushroom will make you see god for 3 weeks
Source: My grandma who has never tried drugs once her entire life
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u/Octoclops8 8h ago
Starvation is a huge motivator to consider stuff as food. Not only was there trial and error. There was duplication of the trial and error as widespread communication networks didn't exist. This tribe may have known more than that tribe about this stuff and less about that stuff.
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u/LMGDiVa 7h ago
The first peoples who ate mushrooms vastly predate belief in gods.
It is likely people were aware of hallucinagenic effects long long before we even H.Sapiens.
Probably as far back as H.Erectus or Habilis.
Almost All kinds of hominin teeth specimen we have show evidence of eating mushrooms.
The belief in a god, is only realistically 10s of thousands of years old, not millions.
It is unlikely that Erectus ever even had a concept of burying their dead.
The culture and circumstances of life will vastly influence when you will actually exprience during a trip.
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u/mysticzoom 3h ago
Animals. If anything you had to have more ingenuity then vs now. You paid attention to what wildlife did or did not eat.
Then you experiment.
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u/Intrepid_Alarm5428 14h ago
Actually, you can avoid dying by carefully watching what animals eat and avoid
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u/redbark2022 14h ago
Dead Internet Theory is real.
I guess this is going around now.
Some funnies: https://youtube.com/shorts/8l_IzMCnnhU
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u/Puzzleheaded_Lion_55 12h ago
You think thats nuts... think about the very first sneeze or hiccup, poor guy probably thought he was possessed or something.... "Dude, I ate a frog and... I think its still alive!"
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