Observability and pharmacological calibration in psychoactive ethnobotany: ceremony duration, admixture selection, and the discovery of ayahuasca

This Zenodo record holds the preprint manuscript, JSON data files, Python analysis scripts, simulation code, and source-extraction data for an ethnobotanical synthesis study evaluating when traditional psychoactive plant knowledge tracks pharmacological reality. The paper addresses three quantitative tests of psychoactive ethnobotanical claims: (i) Cross-cultural comparison of ceremony duration versus pharmacokinetic effect duration across eleven independent indigenous traditions spanning five continents and seven pharmacological classes (serotonergic, ergoline, κ-opioid, GABAergic, GABA-A muscimol, dissociative, mescaline). Ceremony duration tracks pharmacokinetic duration log–log with Pearson r = 0.977, p = 2.5 × 10⁻⁷, n = 11; slope 1.010, 95% CI for r [0.910, 0.994]. (ii) A 118-plant Amazonian admixture catalogue assembled from 70 years of ethnobotanical documentation (Schultes 1957, Luna 1986, Ott 1994, contemporary mestizo ethnographic sources), cross-classified by purpose observability (Observable / Mixed / Non-observable) and pharmacological validity (Active n=12 / Candidate n=106). Active admixture plants cluster at the extremes of the purpose-observability distribution while candidate plants concentrate in the middle (χ²(2) = 20.17, p = 4.16 × 10⁻⁵), a bimodal rather than monotonic pattern. (iii) An agent-based simulation comparing six search strategies for the DMT + MAO-I combination against a 1600-candidate Amazonian flora baseline. Guided iterative search converges on the target in centuries (median ~100 years, 100% success); pure random trial-and-error fails within the 1000-year archaeological-plausibility window (26% success). The manuscript is currently in submission to Ethnobotany Research and Applications. This Zenodo deposit includes the manuscript file and the complete data and code base used to produce the reported results. Author: Elliot Allan, Deep Time Research Institute (deeptime-research.org). ORCID: 0009-0008-8541-0944.