Mycologists in southerly Africa have fall upon the closest wild relative of naturalize magic mushrooms , revealing new insights into thegenetic history of psychedelic fungus kingdom . draw the new mintage in an as - yet un - compeer - go over study , the investigator say their discovery challenges the assumption that shrooms circularize around the world alongside domestic cattle , suggesting that the mind - altering specimens may rather have hitched a ride on the poop of ancient bison .
So far , around 160 different mixture ofpsilocybin - containing mushrooms have been discovered . Of these , a species calledPsilocybe cubensishas become by far the most pop , and is now tame across the world by people seeking psychedelic experiences .
WhileP. cubensiscan be rise at home or in a science laboratory from spores , its preferred born substratum is cattle droppings . In fact , the species was first divulge in a patch of cow shite in Cuba in 1904 ( hence the name " cubensis " ) , although exactly where it originates persist a issue of considerable debate and dubiety .
agree to the writer of the new subject area , the leading supposition is thatP. cubensisfirst appeared in Africa before being inadvertently introduced to the Americas when Europeans institute domesticated cattle to the part in the 15th and sixteenth centuries . However , the African continent has historically been understudied by mycologists , which means there is no across-the-board database of local mushrooms that would admit for this theory to be quiz .
Indeed , P. cubensishas yet to be line up in Africa , although there are reports of mushroom that look very much like this popular breed of shroom develop in oxen fields throughout the continent . Between 2013 and 2022 , the study source collected several specimens of one such lookalike in Zimbabwe and South Africa , which they then sought to identify via geomorphological and transmissible analyses .
Results suggest that the mushroom is notP. cubensis , but a airless free - living relative that the researchers have namedP. ochraceocentrata . This breakthrough fetch the entire number ofPsilocybespecies find out in Africato seven , three of which have been officially key out in the last six months .
Significantly , an examination of the new mushroom-shaped cloud ’s DNA bring out that it shared a coarse ancestor withP. cubensisaround 1.5 million days ago . According to the study source , this ancient mushroom probably grew on the droppings of wild herbivore , and “ this habit likely predisposedP. cubensisto its present specialization on domesticated cattle droppings . ”
Moreover , becauseP. ochraceocentrataandP. cubensissplit millions rather than hundreds of long time ago , it now seems less likely that the latter evolve from an ancestral mintage that was brought to Cuba by European colonists in recent centuries .
“ Our divergence psychoanalysis suggests that their MRCA [ most recent common antecedent ] likely originated alongside the big herbivore , possibly during the expansion of … grassland in East Africa 1.8 - 1.2 [ million years ago ] ” , write the researchers . “ Coincidentally , this is also the period whenHomo erectusbecame the dominant hominin in East Africa and the first to spread from Africa through Eurasia via the Levantine corridor alongside large herbivores , including bovids , ” they tot up . “ These major migration case present a potential boulevard for diffusion of the MRCA ofP. cubensisandP. ochraceocentratafrom Africa . ”
In other discussion , as these ancient herbivores and hominids carried the spores of this ancestralmagic mushroomaround the earth , it may have evolved for adapt to new home ground , eventually yield rise toP. cubensissomewhere along the agency .
Attempting to construct the after part - have it off mushroom cloud ’s journeying to Cuba , the researchers indicate that it may have reached the Americas when bison first crossed over from Asia some sentence between 195,000 and 135,000 years ago . Such a theory is unbelievable to go unquestioned and will need to be defend by additional evidence , but these finding do at least wind at a new narrative in whichP. cubensisarrived in the New World long before humans did .
The sketch is currently uncommitted as a preprint onbioRxiv .
