I am not addressing any of the latter. I was responding to your question of how do we know they ate that. In this case plausibility does mean it happened. Someone is going to have tried it at some point no matter what (which doesn't mean it has any significance whatsoever).
Not at all. The analogous statement would be suggesting that we don't know if they ever had ore bearing rocks in a fire. My claim would be that it would be extraordinary if this never happened by chance. Copper smelting (or, in the case of the original "stoned ape" proposition, such things as incorporating psilocybian mushroom use into religious rituals, for instance) would be a separate issue.
Nope. Plausibility means that someone COULD HAVE done it. To say that they DID is a leap that's unjustified by the data at hand. Weirder things have happened.cosmicaug said:
You missed why I picked copper.
I'm not merely saying it's plausible that someone could have done it but that it is implausible that no ancestor between a couple of hundred thousand years ago and a few million years ago never did. It's not merely plausible, it's extremely plausible and its converse is extremely implausible. I can say it with a hell of a lot more justification than people who look at !Kung, or the hunter gatherer group of the week, to speculate what earlier societies might have been like. The reason I can justify this is because the nature of the beast has not changed that much in all this time. We know that we'll eat anything we can get our hands on and there's no reason to think that it hasn't been the case for at least 200000 years.
Again, nothing follows from the fact that it would be extraordinarily unlikely that all of our not so distant ancestor never consumed a psilocybin containing mushroom.
Yes, I readily admit that I totally missed it. But it's irrelevant that I missed it because my point was not that copper would surely be smelted by accident in a campfire but, if anything, that copper smelting technology would not automatically develop if the right kind of rock got dropped in a campfire (even though it is almost certain that, at some point, the right kind of rock did get dropped in a campfire). In the same way, one of our ancestors eating one of these fungi is not significant in and of itself (no matter what McKenna might have suggested) and is thus nothing like smelting copper (which is the case that Zeuzzz is trying to make*) but more like copper bearing ore being thrown into a campfire. It takes more than trowing the right rock at a fire to smelt copper but to suppose that the right rock was never thrown at a fire by chance alone is not parsimonious. Of course, the obstacle to copper smelting does not lie there (just like our ancestors never running into psilocybin containing fungi is not an obstacle to the stoned ape hypothesis --there are many obstacles to it, just not that one).
What on Earth made you think I don't criticize the rest of archaeology this way?cosmicaug said:
No, as a matter of fact we DON'T know that. For example, my grandfather once offered a friend some fried pumpkin blossoms. The friend thought my grandfather was trying to poison him. My family has always enjoyed eating them, though--they were among my favorite foods growing up. Most people won't eat opposum, not even red-necks. Many won't eat squirel. When The Hunger Games movie came out I got involved in a discussion to that effect--I argued that the characters didn't show the starvation that was supposed to be going on, and someone responded "They're eating squirrel! They MUST be despirate!" (paraphrased, obviously) Then there are things like Hallal and kosher. Foods considered edible have always been a function of the society in question as much as anything else, so it's just as reasonable to assume that ancient man follows in the pattern every other culture we know of has followed as it is to say they didn't.
This entire thread is supported by this notion. If we were having a different discussion, sure, I'd be willing to grant you the point--but considering that your line of reasoning is the ONLY THING supporting this thread it must necessarily be held to a higher standard. Again, I'm more than happy to grant that it's extremely likely that humans ate plants that messed with our minds, but Zeuzzz and his sources are taking that and constructing an entire evolutionary history off of that likelyhood. In such cases probability simply isn't good enough.
You're still missing the point: Copper is not infrequently found in native form. Meaning that it's not dropping the right kind of rock into a camp fire, it's using a material that's already available. Copper nuggets and sheets of various sizes have been found throughout history (iron too, by the way--bogs do weird things to redox potential). It's simply a matter of making it into a useful shape, which wouldn't be too hard. Largest native copper nugget I've seen is a few hundred pounds, by the way--enough to make a fair number of tools.
This doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. If our ancestors didn't live in an area where the appropriate mushroom grew it's proof that they didn't eat the mushroom. There may be other reasons to reject the idea, but that alone would be entirely sufficient. And anything that completely disproves a hypothesis certainly qualifies as an obstical!
That is definitely true but, as I (and maybe others) have pointed out, I do not believe that that is a statement you can validly make (to attempt to support that statement you trotted out a current range* of a single species of mushroom which proves pretty much nothing). You can neither tell me where we were (what's our fossil record of the relevant time period? Hundreds of specimens or is even that a gross overestimate?) nor what the range of the relevant mushrooms was back then (only that the range is wide at the present).
Let's be clear here: I NEVER intended that map to be taken as support of my statement. I posted it as an example of the type of thing Zeuzzz should provide to support HIS research. It was illustrative, not demonstrative. OF COURSE it proves nothing in regards to what humans ate! It wasn't intended to, and your criticism is the equivalent of saying that the Mona Lisa is a horrible painting because it doesn't have a high octain raiting.cosmicaug said:
Of course I can. I can't say "Our ancestors didn't live in an area where these mushrooms grow" but, despite what you seem to think, I never said that so it's irrelevant. I CAN say "IF we lived in an area where these mushrooms didn't grow, THEN we couldn't have eaten them", and I will stick by that until you can demonstrate large-scale trade sufficient to carry edible mushrooms long distances in operation at the time in question (which is required in order to eat something that doesn't grow where you live). (And yes, I understand that the time in question isn't pinned down. Doesn't matter, really--pick a time, and if there's no large-scale trade sufficient to carry edible mushrooms long distances humans would still have been limited to what was grown more or less locally.)
Oh, no, it's a LOT more. Add to that the archaeological evidence and you can get an extremely good picture of where humans were when.
True enough, though I suspect it's partially due to the fact that I never attempted to do so. Fortunately for me, I don't need to. Because my position is not "Zeuzzz is wrong" but rather "There is insufficient data to accept Zeuzzz's conclusions", the fact that no one has provided any such maps is evidence in my favor. Those maps are the first step in providing enough data to accept or reject Zeuzzz's idea--without them, this idea doesn't rise to the level of being wrong.
Some psychoactives are mutagenic or teratogenic, the effects aren't specifically linked.
Come again?
It really is irrelevant. All hypothesis are "made up". The problem here is, as has been pointed out repeatedly, that this one isn't even wrong.
Come again?
You do know the effect profile of deliriants like datura, don't you?
Something to do with trains, probably
