Earliest evidence for magic mushroom use in Europe
EUROPEANS may have used magic mushrooms to liven up
religious rituals 6000 years ago. So suggests a cave mural in Spain,
which may depict fungi with hallucinogenic properties - the oldest
evidence of their use in Europe.
The Selva Pascuala mural, in a cave
near the town of Villar del Humo, is dominated by a bull. But it is a
row of 13 small mushroom-like objects that interests Brian Akers at
Pasco-Hernando Community College in New Port Richey, Florida, and Gaston Guzman at the Ecological Institute of Xalapa in Mexico. They believe that the objects are the fungi
Psilocybe hispanica, a local species with hallucinogenic properties.
Like the objects depicted in the mural,
P. hispanica
has a bell-shaped cap topped with a dome, and lacks an annulus - a ring
around the stalk. "Its stalks also vary from straight to sinuous, as
they do in the mural," says Akers (
Economic Botany, DOI: 10.1007/s12231-011-9152-5).
This isn't the oldest prehistoric
painting thought to depict magic mushrooms, though. An Algerian mural
that may show the species
Psilocybe mairei is 7000 to 9000 years old.
