Mark Plotkin
speaker
534 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 9 Jul
Mark Plotkin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The stoned egg theory, which was put forward by our late friend Terence McKenna, posited that when humans, pre-humans, came down from the trees for whatever reason, they saw these mushrooms.
Maybe they were following big game.
And in the feces of the big game, these mushrooms were sprouting up.
These are definitely dung-loving mushrooms, and they're magic mushrooms.
So that created cognition.
Nobody's been able to explain satisfactorily why the pre-human brain became the human brain about 300,000 years ago in terms of its rapid growth in size.
There's an equally interesting theory called the Donald Monkey Hypothesis,
which says that when our ancestors came down from the trees, they weren't looking for magic mushrooms.
They were looking for ripe fruit because the ripest fruit falls to the ground.
And what happens to ripe fruit when it falls to the ground?
If it doesn't get eaten, it ferments.
and creates alcohol.
So that alcohol is what caused cognition and social behavior and bonding.
And then my theory, I call the Mocha Java Man hypothesis, which is noting that we arose as a species in East Africa, mostly in and around the Olduvai Gorge.
And at the northern edge of that, you have the original coffee forest, which is essentially what today we refer to as Southern Ethiopia.
And coffee berries are bright red.
You can't miss them.
And they're kind of tasty.
And they're full of caffeine.
So I like to compare theories by saying, imagine three prosimians running across the African savanna being chased by a hungry lion.
Showing 1–20 of 534 · page 1 of 27
Next →