In 1950, archaeologists digging through a waterlogged peat bog in Yorkshire made a surprising find: dozens of perfectly preserved mushrooms, 11,000 years old, carefully cut and deliberately scorched. They were tinder fungi that had been carried by nomadic hunter-gatherers as portable fire kits. The earliest known, in fact. And then, because archaeology moves at its own geological pace, the field largely moved on, and mushrooms disappeared from the story again.
It took another 75 years before the tools existed to really understand what those fungi represented, and to find the others scattered across the entire arc of human prehistory in dental plaque, pottery residue, leather pouches and burial pits. Writing in New Scientist earlier this month, journalist Benjamin Taub pulls together a wave of recent findings that collectively make the striking argument that fungi were not incidental to human survival and the development of civilisation. They were woven through it the whole time.
The blind spot
The reason we missed this for so long is almost embarrassingly simple. Mushrooms are made mostly of water, which means they decompose fast and leave almost nothing behind. They are, as Hannah O’Regan at the University of Nottingham puts it, “almost totally absent from the fossil record.” When you can’t find something, you tend to assume it wasn’t there, or wasn’t important. And so for decades, the conversation about prehistoric diets was essentially limited to meat and plants, full stop.
But there was another problem too. The stable isotope analysis that archaeologists have used since the 1970s to read ancient dietary signals from bones couldn’t distinguish between mushrooms and the things they superficially resemble. Boletus-type mushrooms (the ones we call porcini) have nitrogen values close to meat. Other species overlap with plants. So even when fungi were present in ancient diets, the existing tools were labelling them as something else entirely.
“We called our paper ‘The missing mushrooms‘. Because they must be there, we just can’t find them.”
– Hannah O’Regan, University of Nottingham
What changed things was a combination of techniques that didn’t exist, or weren’t being applied to archaeology, until recently. They include ancient DNA analysis of dental plaque, refined microscopy capable of identifying fungal micro-residues in pottery cracks, and isotopic work by researchers like Justina Stonytė in Lithuania, who is cataloguing mushroom isotope signatures for the first time. The picture that’s emerging from all of this is not a minor revision to the story. It’s a significant one.
Neanderthals, toothaches, and penicillin
In 2017, Laura Weyrich at Pennsylvania State University and her team analysed DNA from Palaeolithic dental plaque and found that a group of Neanderthals in what is now Belgium were eating gray shag mushrooms, while a community in northern Spain was consuming split gill fungi. These were our archaic cousins, who had been characterised – somewhat lazily, it turns out – as hypercarnivores, basically the polar bears of the Pleistocene.
One member of that Spanish group, who lived roughly 48,000 years ago, had apparently been chewing on grasses colonised by penicillin moulds, and appears to have been suffering from a dental abscess at the time. Whether this was deliberate self-medication is impossible to confirm, but Weyrich notes that the penicillin traces showed up in only that one individual. It is at least an interesting coincidence, and possibly something more.
What this tells us about Neanderthals is that they were paying attention to the world around them in ways we’ve underestimated. And what it tells us about archaeological methodology is that a species’ relationship with an entire kingdom of organisms can be hiding in plain sight for decades, simply because we didn’t have the right questions to ask.
Ötzi’s belt, and a theory about fish
One of the most vivid figures in all of this is Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,300-year-old mummy found in the Italian Alps in 1991, whose remarkably preserved possessions have been studied ever since. Among other things, he was carrying amadou – the felt-like fire-starting material processed from tinder fungus. He was also carrying two dried birch polypore mushrooms on leather thongs hanging from his hunting belt, which researchers initially interpreted as medicine for the intestinal parasites he was known to carry.
But Mariana Villani, who is researching Ötzi’s fungi at Cardiff University and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has a different hypothesis that she’s still developing. Her reading of the evidence – the shape of the mushrooms, their position on the belt, the presence of cordage and net among his possessions, and an 18th-century Swedish ethnography describing birch polypore used as fishing float buoyancy aids – leads her to suggest that these fungi were fishing equipment. She’s tested this herself. Coated in beeswax, dried birch polypore floats for hours, can be re-dried and reused, and apparently works well enough that Villani caught eight fish in three hours during her own experiments.
There’s no direct archaeological proof yet, and no fish in Ötzi’s stomach contents. But Villani suggests that we have spent years scrutinising one of the most thoroughly examined prehistoric humans ever found, and we may still be misreading some of what he carried because we’re not asking the right questions about fungi.
Beer, burial pits, and the birth of community
Perhaps the most consequential findings in Taub’s piece, though, come from a 2024 study by Li Liu and her team at Stanford University, who found evidence of 10,000-year-old rice beer in pottery residues from early east Asian farming sites. The fermentation process involved a red mould called Monascus, which breaks down starch into sugar – the first step in a two-stage fungal fermentation chain that predates any existing textual records of the technique by some 8,000 years.
The significance of this isn’t just that people were drinking much earlier than we thought, though that’s interesting enough. It’s the context. This beer appears at exactly the moment when humans were first transitioning from nomadic life to settled agricultural communities. And some of the oldest pottery vessels bearing traces of it were found in burial pits, suggesting that this fungal brew was tied to ritual, to the marking of death and lineage, to the kind of shared ceremony that helps groups of people form a coherent identity and stay together.
Just as Stonehenge helped Neolithic communities identify with their land, qu-based alcohol enhanced the rituals that bound people to a particular place or group.
Liu suspects fungi may have provided social glue at the very moment humans needed it most. When they were giving up a mobile, independent way of life and committing to staying put, farming together, and building something that would eventually become civilisation. That’s not a peripheral detail. It’s a load-bearing piece of the story.
What the absence actually meant
There’s a pattern running through all of this. In each case – the tinder fungi, the Neanderthal dental plaque, Ötzi’s belt, the pottery residues – fungi were present in the evidence the whole time. The gap wasn’t in the historical record; it was in our capacity to read it. The tools didn’t exist. The questions hadn’t been asked. The isotopic values of mushrooms hadn’t been catalogued. The microscopy techniques hadn’t been applied to archaeology. And so we built a story about human history that was, by default, a story about what we could see and measure: meat, plants, stone, bone.
That story turned out to be incomplete because the version of the past we inherited was shaped as much by methodological constraints as by actual evidence. What’s being revised now isn’t just the diet of Neanderthals or the biography of Ötzi. It’s the broader habit of treating absence of evidence as evidence of absence, especially when the thing we’re looking for happens to decompose quickly and leave almost no trace.
Our relationship with mushrooms has always been there. We’re only just learning how to see it.
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