The “Tassili mushroom shaman” is a masked, squatting figure in the Round Heads style of rock painting at Tassili n’Ajjer, a plateau in southeastern Algeria listed by UNESCO in 1982 for its more than 15,000 drawings and engravings (UNESCO). The Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini proposed in 1989 and 1992 that small objects on and around such figures were mushrooms (Samorini, 1992). His 1992 paper notes that earlier researchers read the same shape as an arrowhead, an oar or a flower.
The popular “bee-faced” image is not a photograph. The Guardian reports it is a drawing by Kat Harrison, made from a photograph in a book with damaged parts filled in, and spread by Terence McKenna’s 1992 Food of the Gods (The Guardian, 2025).
The age is also overstated. Dating of deposits below painted walls showed the paintings are younger than about 9,000–10,000 years (Mercier et al., 2012), and the archaeologist Jean-Loïc Le Quellec places the Round Heads style probably no earlier than about 5500 BC (Le Quellec, 2013). No physical trace of mushroom use has been reported at the site, so the reading remains a hypothesis.
Sources
- Samorini, 1992, Integration 2&3
- The Guardian long read, 1 May 2025
- Mercier et al., 2012, Quaternary Geochronology
- Le Quellec, 2013, Préhistoires méditerranéennes
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