Submitted 4 hours ago by Mickey7@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/6df848fc-d82d-4549-9e78-92415642ce8d.png
Everything we currently eat or are able to eat was established by the deaths of millions of people who helped us to figure out what not to eat. And we’re dumb animals, so often it would take several deaths or unfortunate circumstances before we figured out what was bad for us.
It’s kind of like OSHA rules and regulations … it’s all written in blood and death.
You could say the same our very DNA. Natural selection provided the guard rails that shaped evolution over the eons. And you know that was on the other side of those guard rails? Blood and death! :D
They mainly just observed what other animals ate…
What other animals eat ≠ safe for human. So still trail and error.
The funniest one is the mushroom that makes you see tiny people for like a week. It’s not like psilocybin that causes different visuals depending on the person. As far as we can tell, the only visual hallucinations that these mushrooms produce are just… Tiny people. Like little Smurf-sized people on every surface, clinging to your clothes, climbing up walls, etc…
Do not eat the reality-veil lifting shrooms.
Lilliputian affairs aren’t meant for humankind and the separation is intentional. Hmph.
And this is why you don’t eat a fairy circle.
Hunger will make you eat all kinds of things.
I’m pretty sure that last one explains why they kept coming back to them.
They used children and dogs for sure
Children at a certain age keep putting everything in their mouth and trying to eat it. It’s wonder any used to survive.
When I was a kid we found some berries in a field, but we didn’t know if they were safe to eat. So we asked our parents, they didn’t know either, they told us to ask our great-grandmother since she was super old she might know what the berries were.
So we took the berries to grandma and she looked at them for a second and then immediately ate the all of them.
“So… they’re safe to eat?”
“Come back tomorrow, if I’m still alive they are safe to eat”
She reasoned that she was old and if the berries killed her it wouldn’t be a big deal. But if one of us kids died it would be a huge tragedy.
So from that experience, I’m guessing it wasn’t children that tested if things were safe to eat it was probably the elderly.
I get the feeling that ‘getting old enough to be less functionally important to the group’ wasn’t a common phenomenon in the time period depicted in the meme, but I also think your logic tracks.
They were probably testing the mushrooms since before dogs existed
…before dogs existed? Do you think there was some date where we invented dogs? Wolfs have always been around, and all dogs are is domesticated wolfs.
1 God Shroom Please!
MrEff@lemmy.world 15 minutes ago
Can you imagine this as a punishment or execution method? Like, you committed some terrible crime or were on the wrong end of a feud, and now you are forced to eat a mushroom, wait two or three days, then get force fed (or even unknowingly fed!) the next one. Then you have some shalman/stone-age-food-scientist recording what happens.