Its easy to survive a 1% death rate per meal, for one meal. That's a 99% survival rate. But in the real world, you're starving, the kids are starving, thats a

Its easy to survive a 1% death rate per meal, for one meal. That's a 99% survival rate. But in the real world, you're starving, the kids are starving, thats a mushroom, poisonous of course, but maybe if we split it 30 ways among the entire tribe we'll all feel sick but each gain 10 calories... The real problem with 99% survival rate per meal is there's about 1000 meals per year assuming about three per day, and (0.99) 1000 is essentially zero survival rate after a year. So just eating everything you'll be dead in a year. If you screw up the identification 1 time in 10, the survival rate drops to only a third or so. If I did the math estimates right in my head, for only 10% mushroom fatality rate over 70 years you'd need four 9's reliability in mushroom identification. To relegate the mushroom death rate to tribe-size-mythological rarity would take six 9's of identification reliability. As a smart homo sapiens I bet I could do it but sorting mushrooms into piles of "yum" and "gonna kill ya" is definitely the kind of tribal role I'd give to the tribe member furthest on the right side of the bell curve... This is assuming a "white noise" distribution of toxic and non-toxic mushrooms, and lots of spherical cows. But I think its still a sound mathematical model that "tribes of dumb people" can't live off shrooms but "tribes of smart people" have an acceptably dangerous source of calories at hand, maybe enough to triumph in the long run. Its very much like fishing. The odds of dying ice fishing once with the boy scouts in 2010s is incredibly low. The odds of dying if you feed your entire tribe all winter long for 70 years from ice fishing is disturbingly high unless you're a really smart fisherman. Dumb people who ice fish will drown and their tribe will starve, dumb people who don't ice fish will have their tribe starve. I find it fascinating to compare ice fishing and mushroom gathering to today's attitudes toward nuclear power or car culture or aviation or chemical plants. It seems that extremely high stakes gambling in the lifestyle of "do it right near 100% of the time or everyone in the area dies horribly" is an incredibly ancient urge for our species, its hardly industrial or post industrial, a "savage" from 50Kyrs ago would totally understand our tempting fate with nukes...