How Did Humans First Eat Poisonous Mushrooms

How did humans figure out which mushrooms were safe to eat? For thousands of years, mushrooms were something people had to find in the wild. Some were food, some were medicine, and some could kill you without showing any warning signs. From ancient foragers and Ötzi the Iceman to Roman feasts, Chinese mushroom farming, and the underground mushroom farms beneath Paris, the story of mushrooms is much stranger than it looks. And the weirdest part? The mushroom on your pizza isn't a plant at all. Fungi are actually more closely related to animals than plants. This is the story of how humans learned to live with one of the strangest forms of life on Earth — and eventually learned how to grow it.