Norman Ohler

There was a point in time when there were quite a few of them and the problem became inbreeding and there was a real danger of extinction.

They were vulnerable, you know, they were not on top of the food chain yet.

So they had to develop consciousness.

Consciousness is what basically saved us from extinction.

Without the human consciousness, we wouldn't be here.

You know, that is what made us in the end then superior to the other animals.

So how did this happen?

You can kind of trace how they moved.

You can trace that they went through the Central African rainforests.

And there's one plant there which elephants like, and that's iboga.

And iboga now is like the hot thing of the psychedelic renaissance.

Iboga, iboga, iboga.

But it's also the oldest drug in the book, basically.

They saw that elephants were eating iboga, the root and the leaves, and suddenly we're like walking backwards and we're behaving in an unusual way.

And then people were also using this.

And this was going on over like 100,000 years in the rainforest.

So you can write a story about that.

Was it maybe iboga?

Of course you can't prove it.

Maybe the frontal cortex grew by itself.