Fungi in Culture & History: Folklore & Discoveries

Have fungi really changed human history?

Yes — again and again, often without anyone noticing. Fungi are their own kingdom of life, neither plant nor animal, and for thousands of years people have used them to make fire, bake bread, dye wool, fight infection, and fill their stories with magic. Archaeologists find humans using fungi for food, drink, and medicine going back at least 6,000 years.

This pillar is your map to fungi in culture and history. Start here for the big picture, then follow the linked guides to dig into each story.

What did the earliest people do with fungi?

One of the oldest clues is Ötzi the Iceman, a mummy found frozen in the Alps who died about 5,300 years ago. On a leather cord and in his pouch he carried two kinds of fungi: tinder fungus (Fomes fomentarius), used to carry a glowing ember and start fires, and birch polypore, which may have served as a simple medicine.

That fire-starting trick lasted for thousands of years. People also pounded tinder fungus into a soft, suede-like felt called amadou — an early "mushroom leather" that some makers are rediscovering today.

Safety first: the fungi in these stories were handled by experts and adults. Never pick or eat a wild mushroom yourself — many are poisonous and can look almost exactly like safe ones. Explore wild fungi with your eyes, a camera, and a grown-up nearby.

Which fungi feed us?

Some of our favourite foods exist only because of fungi. A single-celled fungus called yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) burps out bubbles of carbon dioxide that lift bread dough — a trick the ancient Egyptians were using around 4,000 years ago. You can even catch wild yeast from the air to grow a sourdough starter.

Other fungi are grown on purpose for flavour: the blue veins in blue cheese are a mould, Japan's honoured koji mould turns soybeans into soy sauce and miso, and prized truffles grow underground, where trained dogs sniff them out. In Mexico, a corn fungus becomes the cooked delicacy huitlacoche — and every one of these is farmed or shop-bought, never a wild forage.

Can a tiny mould really change the world?

Two of history's biggest turning points came from fungi so small you would need a microscope to study them.

• A mould that saved lives. In 1928, the scientist Alexander Fleming came back from holiday to find a mould had drifted onto a dish and killed the bacteria around it. That mould gave us penicillin, the first true antibiotic — work that won a Nobel Prize in 1945.
• A mould that moved nations. In the 1840s a fungus-like water mould, Phytophthora infestans, rotted Ireland's potatoes. The Irish Potato Famine that followed killed about a million people and pushed roughly another million to emigrate, reshaping whole countries.

Tree-killing fungi have redrawn forests too, wiping out billions of American chestnut trees in the last century. These are stories of history, not health advice — and they carry one clear lesson: never eat mouldy food, which is exactly why grown-ups check and store food with care.

Why are mushrooms all over our stories and art?

Long before anyone understood fungi, they sparked the imagination. People once believed a fairy ring — a circle of mushrooms in the grass — marked where fairies danced. The real cause is just as amazing: one hidden web of mycelium creeping outward year after year, with some rings stretching hundreds of metres across.

Fungi colour our craft as well as our tales. For centuries people boiled certain mushrooms to dye wool sunset-orange and olive-green, and squeezed lichens for the purple dye and the litmus paper still used in science labs. The famous red-with-white-spots toadstool of fairy tales is a real — and poisonous — species, so it is strictly for looking at.

Fungi even shaped one of history's best-loved children's authors. Before Peter Rabbit, Beatrix Potter was a serious mushroom scientist who painted over 350 fungi and sent a research paper to London's Linnean Society in 1897 — a paper that, because she was a woman, a man had to read aloud on her behalf.

The short version

From Ötzi's fire kit to penicillin, from fairy-ring folklore to Beatrix Potter's paintings, the same hidden kingdom keeps turning up at the turning points of history. Fungi have quietly shaped how people make fire, bake, heal, dye cloth, and dream — which is exactly why they are worth getting to know.