I'm agnostic about the Stoned Ape Hypothesis --- Terrence and Dennis McKenna's notion that the extremely ancient, sustained consumption of psilocybin mushrooms played a catalytic role in the evolution of the human brain, particularly in the development of human language and culture.
I lean toward dismissing the idea, but I often marvel at the vast gap between homo sapiens and the great apes, a chasm that Darwinian natural selection can't satisfactorily explain. Yes, chimpanzees also make and use tools ---they strip leaves from a stick to gather termites --- while I'm typing on a computer and posting my musings on the World Wide Web! What happened? How'd we get to be so wonderfully and disastrously smart?
Maybe physicist David Brin's Hugo-Award winning "Uplift Series" provides the answer (advanced species in the galaxy act as patrons of lower species, uplifting them through genetic engineering).
I made the above diorama in my Zen garden. Below is an alternate version of the Stoned Ape Hypothesis, which I'll call Stoned Ape Hypothesis B.
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