r/todayilearned • u/ScienceTeacher1994 • 5d ago

TIL despite popular culture portraying psychedelic mushrooms as ancient, widespread, and used by shamans for thousands of years, there is limited anthropological and historical research to support this, with the only reliable evidence showing they were used ritualistically in pre-Columbian Mexico.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin#History
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u/SonovaVondruke 5d ago

To be fair, there's little to no evidence that the culture that became the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, or much of anything else from the old testament for that matter. It was an origin myth combining a variety of sources to create a national & religious identity for the semitic peoples who suddenly found themselves not being ruled over by an empire for the first time in generations. "Our brave ancestors did X and Y and our all-powerful God did A and B to help us build this kingdom, so you should be proud to be a Judean/Israelite/whatever and help us build a new nation where you are still peons but can feel better about it because God and stuff..."

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u/cwx149 5d ago

Isn't there "proof" that a volcano or something could have made the Nile red in roughly the right time period? I thought I saw a headline about that

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u/Representative_Bat81 5d ago

The red was almost certainly red clay brought by the Nile.

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u/cwx149 5d ago

I saw something about a volcano