The Tassili mushroom shaman: what the Algerian rock art really shows

The Tassili mushroom shaman is the best-known image used to claim that people took psilocybin mushrooms in prehistory. The figure exists, but its mushroom reading is an interpretation, and the version on posters and T-shirts is a modern drawing (The Guardian, 2025). This page separates what the rock art shows from what has been said about it.

What is the Tassili mushroom shaman?

Tassili n'Ajjer is a sandstone plateau in southeastern Algeria. UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site in 1982 and describes more than 15,000 drawings and engravings there, made from about 6000 BC to the first centuries of the common era (UNESCO).

The “mushroom shaman” is one painted figure among them: a masked, squatting human-like figure with small objects sprouting from its arms and legs and scattered around its body. The Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini described it as about 0.8 metres tall and read the objects as mushroom symbols (Samorini, 1992). A Guardian long read describes the popular version as a “bee-faced” figure covered with about 50 mushrooms (Singh, The Guardian, 2025).

It belongs to the Round Heads style, named for large figures with round, featureless heads. The French archaeologist Jean-Loïc Le Quellec notes that the explorer Henri Lhote jokingly called them “Martians”, and that some hurried readers took the name seriously (Le Quellec, 2019).

Where did the Tassili mushroom claim come from?

From Samorini. In an Italian note of April 1989, he proposed that Round Heads paintings show a cult of hallucinogenic mushrooms, and he wrote that the dancers in a scene at Tin Tazarift each hold a mushroom in the right hand. In the same note he called the absolute chronology of the Round Heads “still doubtful” (Samorini, 1989).

His English paper of 1992, in the journal Integration, set the case out in full. Its title dates the paintings to 9000–7000 years before present. Samorini said he had seen the paintings on two visits to Tassili. He pointed to the Tin Tazarift dancers, whose objects are joined to their heads by two dotted lines that he read as “the effect that the mushroom has on the human mind”, and to two masked figures covered in the same small symbols (Samorini, 1992).

The paper is open about the gap. Samorini lists what earlier researchers had seen in the same symbol: an arrowhead, an oar, a plant (probably a flower) or an undefined sign. He argued that a mushroom was the closest match, and suggested at least two kinds were shown, one small with a pointed cap and one larger (Samorini, 1992). That is an argument from shape. No mushroom remains, residues or other physical traces are reported in the paper.

Terence McKenna brought the image to a much wider public in Food of the Gods, published by Bantam Books in 1992 (Open Library). We could not read the book. According to the Guardian’s account, McKenna’s picture was a drawing by his then-wife Kat Harrison, and it is this drawing that became the “mushroom shaman” icon (The Guardian, 2025). Our profile of Terence McKenna covers the rest of his work.

Is the famous Tassili mushroom image a photograph?

No. The writer Andy Letcher pointed out that the popular image “is not a photo of the original, but a copy”, as the Guardian reports. Harrison never saw the painting. She worked from a photograph in a book, and rather than copying it, she filled in features she thought were damaged or incomplete (The Guardian, 2025).

Samorini’s own 1992 illustrations of the main figures were also drawings, credited to a 1964 book by the photographer Jean-Dominique Lajoux (Samorini, 1992). So most people have only ever seen the figure through one or two layers of redrawing. Each layer can sharpen a shape that is faint or broken on the rock.

Even the figure’s location has been corrected. In 1992 Samorini placed it at a site called Matalem-Amazar (Samorini, 1992). His current web page places it at Ti-n-Tarin and says the 1964 book apparently cited the wrong site, following a 2010 study of Round Heads masks (Samorini, web page).

How old are the Tassili paintings?

Probably younger than the claim says, and nobody can date this figure directly. Painted rock art is hard to date because the pigments rarely hold datable carbon. A 2012 study at Tassili noted that radiocarbon attempts had failed to give reliable results, so the team dated 13 sediment samples from deposits at the foot of painted walls instead (Mercier et al., 2012).

The answer was a limit, not a date. The paintings are younger than about 9,000–10,000 years, and the method could not narrow the window further (Mercier et al., 2012). In a 2013 chronology, Le Quellec placed the classic Round Heads style after about 8000 BC and probably not before about 5500 BC. He also stressed that the Sahara has no direct dates comparable to those for European cave art (Le Quellec, 2013).

Compare that with the numbers in circulation. Samorini’s 1992 title says 9000–7000 years before present, which is about 7000–5000 BC (Samorini, 1992). UNESCO’s summary starts the whole site at 6000 BC (UNESCO). A US Forest Service page calls Tassili home to some of the world’s earliest rock art, “10,000 BC” (US Forest Service).

What do critics of the Tassili mushroom reading say?

Archaeologists object on three grounds. The first is method. Le Quellec writes that the 1980s and 1990s brought many attempts to explain Saharan images through altered states of consciousness and a loosely defined “shamanism”, that these readings have been refuted, and that it is misleading to speak of shamanism in Africa at all, where that worldview is not attested (Le Quellec, 2019).

The second is the image itself. The ethnomycologist Brian Akers, who supports a mushroom reading of a different painting in Spain, wrote that he was unsure how secure Tassili’s dating is, that its style is not drawn “from life”, and that a popular drawing based on one figure became an icon of 1990s psychedelia (Akers, Mushroom the Journal). The Guardian piece adds that an earlier archaeologist read the figure as a sheep-man (The Guardian, 2025).

The third is the wider pattern. The Guardian reports that Letcher, in his 2006 book Shroom, examined claimed cases of traditional mushroom use and confirmed only two: psilocybin mushrooms in pre-Columbian Mexico and fly agaric in northern Eurasia. The same piece quotes the historian Erika Dyck, whose Saskatchewan research appears in our Humphry Osmond article, on how ancient-use stories make psychedelics seem more natural and wholesome (The Guardian, 2025).

Supporters have answered. Samorini’s web page quotes two archaeologists who called the hypothesis stimulating or worth attention, and it says Le Quellec was once open to it (Samorini, web page). Being open to a hypothesis is not the same as confirming it, and none of those comments reports new evidence.

Can anyone name the mushroom species in the Tassili paintings?

No, not from the paintings. Samorini did not name a species (Samorini, 1992). The Mexican mycologist Gastón Guzmán suggested Psilocybe mairei in 2012, because that species was first described from Algeria in a dry habitat he thought similar to ancient Tassili. He noted that he had made the suggestion in lectures since the 1990s, and that an earlier guess by Paul Stamets came without a stated source (Guzmán, 2012).

That reasoning rests on where a species grew, not on anything visible in the art. A small painted shape cannot carry the features mycologists use to tell species apart. Our guide to researching mushroom origin stories explains why a place name or a habitat match is not proof of origin.

How did the Tassili mushroom image spread online?

Through citation chains, each one a little more confident than the last. A US Forest Service page calls the figure “the oldest known petroglyph depicting the use of psychoactive mushrooms”, although it is a painting, not an engraving (US Forest Service). Guinness World Records lists Tassili under “oldest depictions of fungi” at 9,000 years, citing McKenna, Samorini and the Forest Service (Guinness World Records). In January 2021 Open Culture ran the headline that the paintings suggest humans used magic mushrooms 9,000 years ago (Open Culture).

Scientific reviews repeat it too. A 2021 paper reproduced Samorini’s drawing of the Tin Tazarift dancers as “estimated to be 7000-9000 years old” (Winkelman, 2021). A 2023 pharmacology review said the Tassili and Spanish murals “date the use” of these mushrooms back 7,000–9,000 years (Mastinu et al., 2023). A 2026 review cited Samorini’s 1992 paper but wrote “9000 BCE”, about 2,000 years older than the paper’s own title (Skalski et al., 2026).

Each step drops a qualifier. “Mushroom-like object” becomes “mushroom”, “hypothesis” becomes “evidence”, “younger than 9,000 years” becomes “9,000 years old”, and a redrawing becomes the picture of the original. The Guardian notes the figure now appears on shirts, mugs and paintings (The Guardian, 2025). The same drift shows up in the stoned ape theory, which this image is often used to illustrate.

Verdict: what does the evidence support?

• Supported: a masked Round Heads figure with many small repeated objects exists at Tassili, and Samorini published it in 1989 and 1992 (Samorini, 1992).
• Supported: the famous “bee-faced” image is a modern redrawing by Kat Harrison, made from a photograph, with damaged parts filled in (The Guardian, 2025).
• Not established: that the objects are mushrooms. Earlier researchers read the same shape as arrowheads, oars or flowers (Samorini, 1992).
• Not established: any species. The Psilocybe mairei suggestion is based on habitat (Guzmán, 2012).
• Overstated: the age. Dating shows the paintings are younger than about 9,000–10,000 years, and the style probably began no earlier than about 5500 BC (Mercier et al., 2012; Le Quellec, 2013).
• Not shown: that anyone ate mushrooms at Tassili, or that the figure is a shaman. No physical evidence of use is reported, and the shamanism label itself is disputed (Le Quellec, 2019).

Our overall rating: an interesting hypothesis, often presented as fact. The documented history of psilocybin mushroom use, from Mesoamerica onward, is told in our history of magic mushrooms, and the psilocybin timeline sets out the dated record.

What we could not check

• The text of Food of the Gods. The Internet Archive copy is restricted, so McKenna’s own words and his caption are known to us only through other writers.
• Lajoux’s 1964 book and the 2010 study of Round Heads masks that corrected the site name. We rely on Samorini’s account of both.
• Akers and colleagues’ 2011 Economic Botany paper and Letcher’s book Shroom, which we know only through later summaries.
• Malika Hachid’s 2013 comment on the dating study and the authors’ reply, which exist but which we did not read.
• Who first read the figure as a sheep-man. The Guardian does not name the archaeologist.

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