> So why the difference between our species and others?
An unpopular theory:
The North African jungles receded toward the end of the most recent ice age, giving way to grasslands, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the branches and took up a life out in the open - following around herds of ungulates, nibbling what they could along the way.
Among the new items in their diet were mushrooms growing in the dung of these ungulate herds. The changes caused by the introduction of this diet containing psilocybin created the synesthesia which led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds.
About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed the mushroom from the human diet, resulting in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to pre-mushroomed and frankly brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.
All primates - and we certainly are primates - have what are called 'male dominance hierarchies'. This means that the meanest monkey in a tribe takes control of the group resources, the females, the weaker males, and this character runs the show, and this is pretty much how we do it today.
In the manure of the ungulate animals that evolved with the primates on the grasslands of Africa, was the mushroom which acted as a force for directing the evolution of human beings away from that of the rest of the anthropoid apes and toward the unique adaptation that we see as special to human beings today.
