McKenna lays out the Stoned Ape hypothesis -- that psilocybin ingestion shaped early human evolution by suppressing dominance hierarchies, strengthening communal bonds and sharpening hunting -- and describes Food of the Gods as a Trojan horse left on the doorstep of anthropology. Released from Esalen's archive as an EXCERPT of a longer August 1992 Esalen talk.

Lecture 1 of the "Esoteric Anthropology" series. Recorded in 1958 at the Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles.

Originally aired as Salon #504 of the Psychedelic Salon podcast. "I tend to think that there is a kind of unconscious racism in the suppression of the idea that the origin of not high culture but of humanism itself is in Africa." "The psychedelic experience is about what is real."