How our ancestors used mushrooms to change the course of human history

Seventy-five years ago, in the depths of a peat bog in Yorkshire, UK, archaeologists made a startling discovery: the perfectly preserved remains of dozens of 11,000-year-old mushrooms. Carefully cut and intentionally scorched, it is thought that these polypores were used by nomadic Mesolithic hunter-gatherers as tinder on their travels, acting as the earliest known portable fire kit.

The discovery was so unlikely because of the near-impossibility of mushrooms being preserved long enough for archaeologists to analyse them. Fungi are composed mostly of water, meaning they rapidly rot and disappear, and so are almost totally absent from the fossil record, says Hannah O’Regan at the University of Nottingham in the UK. As such, the unexpected ways that mushrooms helped our ancient ancestors survive have long remained secret, seemingly lost to time. Decades passed before we learned more.

But in the past few years, new tools have finally allowed us to identify fungal DNA and micro-residues in the mouths, utensils and clothing of prehistoric humans. These breakthroughs are highlighting how a hidden fungi kingdom fed, healed and warmed our Stone Age ancestors – with recent discoveries even illustrating how fungi provided social glue that helped hold early farming communities together, paving the way for the civilisation we live in today.

“By revealing the invisible evidence in the archaeological record, we now see how fungal connections helped the earliest Neolithic communities to develop an understanding of their land and their society,” says Li Lui at Stanford University in California. “These methods had never been applied to archaeology before.” The diversity of mushrooms being unearthed, says Laura Weyrich at Pennsylvania State University, is “helping to change our perspective on past humans”.

The first fungi foragers

Until about a decade ago, the conversation around prehistoric diets was limited to meat and plants, with mushrooms very much off the menu due to their archaeological obscurity. “Neanderthals, for example, have been labelled as carnivorous as polar bears,” says Weyrich. Yet in 2017, her team’s analysis of DNA in Palaeolithic dental plaque revealed that a group of Neanderthals in what is now Belgium supplemented their meaty meals with gray shag mushrooms, while those from a cave in northern Spain dined on split gill mushrooms.

One member of the Spanish group, who lived around 48,000 years ago, even chewed on grasses that had been colonised by penicillin moulds, and may have deliberately sought out this antibiotic fungus as medication for a dental abscess. “That particular individual would have been in an enormous amount of pain, and is the only person that we detected [penicillin] in,” says Weyrich. “That causes us to question, did they actually know that there was some sort of medicinal benefit by consuming it?”

It is impossible to say with certainty whether Neanderthals intentionally self-medicated with fungi, but the discovery that two separate communities ate mushrooms transformed our understanding of this lost human species.

Stable isotope analysis, which has been used since the late 1970s to detect dietary markers in ancient skeletons, was previously thought to show that Neanderthals were hypercarnivores due to the extremely high nitrogen values in their bones. “But what can also raise some of those nitrogen values is the contribution of mushrooms,” says Weyrich. “And in the environments that Neanderthals were living in, it’s much more likely that they were eating a diversity of animals, plants and mushrooms.”

Until recently, it had been impossible to detect the presence of fungi in ancient diets because their isotopic values had never been analysed or catalogued, creating an archaeological blind spot. “Isotope data has always been interpreted as, ‘this is meat, this is plants, and that’s what they ate’,” says Justina Stonytė, whose ongoing research at Lithuania’s Center for Physical Sciences and Technology is helping to fill this knowledge gap. By measuring the isotopic signatures of mushrooms for the first time, her work is revealing that their carbon and nitrogen values overlap with those of both plants and meat, meaning fungi may have been hiding in archaeological dietary signals all along.

Unfortunately, this broad overlap makes it difficult to identify individual mushroom species from isotope data alone, although some fungi do stand out as prime suspects. “We have found that Boletus-type mushrooms are quite close to meat in their nitrogen values, and we can expect ancient humans to have eaten them,” says Stonytė. Boletus mushrooms, better known as porcini, are among the most popular edible fungi in the world and, crucially, spores from this group have been found in the dental plaque of Palaeolithic humans from around 15,000 years ago in Spain.

Shortly after that discovery in 2015, O’Regan and her colleagues authored a paper suggesting that isotopic signals previously attributed to meat consumption could, in fact, reflect the foraging of Boletus or other mushrooms. “We called our paper ‘The missing mushrooms’,” she says. “Because they must be there, we just can’t find them.”

Mushroom fires

Those Boletus spores remain the only preserved remains – excluding DNA – that prove consumption in the deep past, and we are yet to find any preserved edible fungi associated with human remains. Instead, the fire fungi discovered in Yorkshire offer some of the most straightforward evidence for prehistoric mushroom use.

The Mesolithic site of Star Carr, where those peat-coated tinder fungi were discovered back in 1950, yielded a total of 82 ancient mushrooms, all wonderfully preserved by their anaerobic, waterlogged surroundings. Of those, 76 have been identified as Fomes fomentarius, also known as the tinder fungus due to its flammability when processed into a felt-like material called amadou.

The fungi had been both harvested and processed, says Harry Robson at York University, UK, who took part in excavations at Star Carr between 2008 and 2015. “Some had very clear cut marks on the exterior, with bits removed in order to access the inner body of the fungus itself,” he says. In total, 54 of the fungi showed signs of having been scraped and cut into amadou, while 41 were charred.

Researchers believe these bracket mushrooms were vital to the survival of migrating hunter-gatherers, enabling them to stay warm and cook food while on the move. At Star Carr, they were found alongside rolls of paper-thin birch bark, and Robson says they were probably used in conjunction with this material to create a lightweight, compact and highly reliable fire-starting kit that could be used to create a fire without breaking stride. “If you’ve got the equipment and apparatus to transport fire, then that is a game changer for nomadic societies,” he says.

Further examples of tinder fungi have emerged from the boggy ground at the 7300-year-old site of La Draga in Spain, as well as at Mullerup in Denmark, Hohen Viecheln in Germany and Vis I in Russia. The presence of amadou at such a variety of archaeological sites suggests that this portable pyro-technology was in use 11,000 years ago and continued to play a role throughout the Neolithic period, attesting to its unique value to prehistoric humans.

Yet it is the famous mummified Ötzi the Iceman – who lived some 5300 years ago in the Italian Alps – who provides the celebrity endorsement for F. fomentarius. Within a leather pouch preserved alongside Ötzi, researchers found amadou created from this mushroom, alongside his trusty pyrite strike-a-light. Pyrite fragments were even found lodged between the spongy amadou fibres, leaving no doubt that the iceman’s fire fungi had been ignited on his solo travels.

Ötzi’s mushrooms

Amadou wasn’t the only fungal innovation Ötzi carried with him on his final journey. Threaded on leather thongs that probably hung from his belt, archaeologists found two dried birch polypore mushrooms.

The researchers who discovered these fungi back in 1998 interpreted their use as medicinal, noting that Ötzi may have ingested them to treat a whipworm infestation in his intestines. Subsequent analyses have highlighted the anti-parasitic, antimicrobial, anti-cancer and immune-boosting properties of birch polypore.

Yet when the contents of Ötzi’s stomach were examined, there was no indication that he had ingested birch polypore mushrooms. This result weakened the medical hypothesis, and it is only now that research is finally providing an alternative explanation.

Mariana Villani is currently investigating the traditional uses of the various mushrooms that Ötzi encountered as part of her research at Cardiff University and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the UK. Noting that Otzi carried the birch polypore mushrooms on his hunting belt, she has a radically new and as-yet unpublished idea regarding their function: as fishing floats.

Villani draws parallels between Ötzi’s fungi and others mentioned in an 18th-century Swedish ethnography, which describes their use as buoyancy aids for fishing nets. Both mushrooms have a beaded shape, mirroring the design of traditional cork fishing floats and the modern plastic variety. She points out that Ötzi also carried pieces of cordage and net, as well as a bone awl that, she says, “really looks like a fishing hook”. Villani has even conducted her own experiments using dried birch polypore mushrooms as fishing floats, both in Ötzi’s native Alpine valley and in her home country of Brazil.

“I caught eight fish in 3 hours!” she says. Villani found that, when coated in beeswax, the mushroom floats remained buoyant for several hours, and could be re-dried and reused multiple times with no loss of function. “The way the mushrooms were just hanging on Ötzi’s belt would have been perfect for drying them after fishing,” she says.

Unfortunately, however, no fish were found in Ötzi’s stomach, indicating that his final meal didn’t include any aquatic prey. There is also a distinct lack of direct evidence for Neolithic fishing practices in his native Schnalstal valley, although nets, fish traps, harpoons and canoes have been found at Stone Age sites along the shores of several nearby Alpine lakes.

Villani, though, is convinced. “He was such a skilled hunter and survivalist, but fishing has always been overlooked when it comes to Ötzi. If you look at these mushrooms, the most likely explanation for me is that they were used as fishing floats,” she says.

Fish may not have been the only food that Ötzi accessed with the help of fungi. Honey was probably a “staple food” for his community, according to Villani, and numerous ethnographic reports from recent times describe hunter-gatherers burning F. fomentarius to smoke beehives in order to harvest this resource. Amazingly, certain compounds in these tinder fungi protect honeybees from the notorious Varroa destructor mite, which is currently decimating colonies worldwide.

Despite a lack of solid evidence linking Ötzi to this practice, Villani’s research builds a case for it by highlighting the abundance of bee-friendly fungi in the Schnalstal valley. Puffballs, for instance, are among the most prominent local mushrooms, and Indigenous communities worldwide burn these spore-filled spheres – often in conjunction with F. fomentarius – to anaesthetise bees while harvesting honey.

“Puffballs are one of the most useful mushrooms ever, so it’s very likely that they were used by Ötzi and his contemporaries,” says Villani.

Fungal fermentation

Pastoral communities like Ötzi’s began to appear when the last glacial period gave way to the present Holocene Epoch some 11,700 years ago, with the changing climate allowing humans to transition from hunter-gatherers to sedentary agriculturalists. Numerous factors contributed to this seismic shift. The emergence of new fungal allies, though, is one that is largely underappreciated.

Discoveries made by Liu and her colleagues at Stanford University in 2024 revealed how fungi helped early rice cultivators to brew some of the world’s first beers. As the weather became wetter and warmer, rice naturally attracted a red-coloured mould called Monascus, which secretes enzymes that break down starch into sugar, ready to be converted to alcohol by yeasts in the air. Liu’s team found evidence of this two-stage fungal fermentation process in residues adhering to 10,000-year-old pottery, representing the earliest rice beer in east Asia.

The researchers used highly refined microscopy techniques to identify fragmentary pieces of Monascus on the ancient vessels, as well as granules of starch that showed clear signs of having undergone enzymatic attack. “They were prevented from decomposing by falling into cracks and pores on the surface of the pottery, but it takes a certain skill to use microscopes to identify them,” says Liu. “So this field is still very small, and only our team currently has the necessary expertise to identify these moulds effectively.”

Textual records describing this fungal fermentation process, known as red qu, only go back a couple of millennia, and so Liu and her team’s findings rewrote the history books. “Most scholars believed that red qu-based alcohol was developed about 2000 years ago, so when we discovered that the earliest beers date back to 10,000 years ago, it was a surprise,” says Liu.

These findings indicate that alcohol production began just as rice cultivation took off and people started settling down in farming villages for the first time. In turn, this hints at a central role for booze in helping these early communities thrive. Previously, historians recognised the importance of beer in lubricating political and religious gatherings in major civilisations, including the Egyptian and Inca empires. This new discovery, however, provides the first indication that alcohol was adopted for community-building purposes thousands of years before these powers rose.

Some of the oldest traces of qu were found on pottery vessels retrieved from burial pits, suggesting that beer was connected to mortuary practices. “This tradition probably helped to form a cultural identity and enforce lineage,” says Liu, indicating that these fungal beers played a role in cementing social, political and religious frameworks.

Traditionally, archaeology has been inclined to focus on megalithic monuments’ role in creating group identity, perhaps because they are exactly what fungi are not: durable, conspicuous and willing to give up their stories. Now, a small but growing group of researchers are beginning to tell a quieter tale of human evolution, in which mushrooms helped our ancestors survive the last glacial period and navigate the beginnings of civilisation. “Just as Stonehenge helped Neolithic communities to identify with their land or territory, qu-based alcohol enhanced the rituals that bound people to a particular place or group,” says Liu.

The more we learn, the more we understand that the absence of fungi from the archaeological record says less about their importance to prehistoric humans than it does about our own methodological blind spots.

In other words, the hidden kingdom was always there. We are only just learning how to see it.