Where Did Psilocybe Cubensis Come From? The African Discovery

By The Spore Source · Updated September 26, 2026

Intended use. Our Psilocybe cubensis spore syringes are sold for microscopy, taxonomy and educational use only. This guide covers the species’ history and the published science on its origins. It does not cover cultivation, effects or dosing, and we do not answer questions about them.

In this guide

• The classic story: described from Cuba in 1906
• The cattle theory
• The African discovery: Psilocybe ochraceocentrata
• What the discovery changes
• So where does Psilocybe cubensis come from?
• How wild cubensis became today’s strains
• What this means for spore collectors
• Frequently asked questions
• Sources

The classic story: described from Cuba in 1906

The species entered science in 1906, when the American mycologist Franklin Sumner Earle described it from Cuba under the name Stropharia cubensis. It was later moved into the genus Psilocybe, and Psilocybe cubensis is the name every spore vendor uses today, including us.

Cuba is only where it was first written up, not where the species began, and the search for where Psilocybe cubensis might really come from has run for more than a century since. The mushroom turned out to grow across the tropics and subtropics, from the U.S. Gulf Coast and South America to Thailand, Cambodia, India and Australia. Almost everywhere it grows, it grows in humid grassland on the same thing: the dung of cattle and other grazing animals, including water buffalo in parts of Asia. That close tie to domestic cattle is the root of the most repeated story about where it came from.

The cattle theory

For decades the standard explanation ran like this. Cattle are not native to the Americas. They arrived with European colonists around 1500. If P. cubensis depends on cattle dung, the reasoning went, it probably arrived with them from Africa or Europe. In the 2024 preprint of their study, the researchers behind the 2026 paper call this the prevailing hypothesis: that cubensis originated in Africa and was carried to the Americas by Spanish colonists.

The same story is told for Australia, where cubensis is thought to have arrived with introduced cattle. A 2023 genome study in Current Biology, led by Alistair McTaggart, sequenced 38 Australian wild isolates and found that the Australian population is naturalized: it went through a bottleneck when it arrived and has since recovered, and it holds much more genetic diversity than cultivated strains do. Our Blue Meanie guide covers the one well-known strain with an Australian origin story.

The cattle theory fit the dung habit, but no one had found a wild African relative to back it up.

The African discovery: Psilocybe ochraceocentrata

In January 2013 Cathy Sharp of the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe collected mushrooms in Zimbabwe that looked like P. cubensis. Over the following years, more collections turned up across Zimbabwe and South Africa, all on or near the dung of large herbivores, and all identified at first as cubensis.

A team of five mycologists, Alexander Bradshaw, Bryn Dentinger, Sharp, Breyten van der Merwe of Stellenbosch University and Keaton Tremble, sequenced them alongside type specimens of every known and accessible African Psilocybe. The DNA said the African mushrooms were not cubensis at all. They were a separate, previously unrecognized species, which the team named Psilocybe ochraceocentrata for the ochre-yellow center of its cap.

The work appeared first as a preprint on bioRxiv in December 2024, which is when the story first reached the news. The peer-reviewed version was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in March 2026. So the discovery is not new in 2026, but its formal publication is.

A cubensis-looking line that has circulated in the hobby for years as “Natal Super Strength” (NSS), also sold as “Transkei,” is this species. As van der Merwe put it, until this study “nobody realised it was a totally separate species.”

What the discovery changes

The key number is the split date. The team’s molecular clock analysis puts the last common ancestor of P. cubensis and P. ochraceocentrata at about 1.5 million years ago. That is long before cattle were domesticated, so the two mushrooms were separate species long before any domestic cow existed to carry them.

Two conclusions follow from that.

• The dung habit is old. Both species live on the dung of large grazing animals, which suggests their common ancestor did too. Cubensis did not learn to live on cattle dung from cattle. It was already suited to dung, and domestic cattle simply offered it more of it.
• The simple cattle story looks less likely. The Mail & Guardian described the result as overturning the long-held belief that cubensis reached the Americas only in the 1500s with European cattle, and Popular Science reported that the researchers now think cattle may not have brought it there.

So where does Psilocybe cubensis come from?

Here is what the evidence supports as of September 2026. Its closest known wild relative is African. The two species diverged about 1.5 million years ago. Both are dung specialists, and so, most likely, was their ancestor. Its close tie to cattle dung is recent, but its taste for dung is not.

What is not settled is where cubensis itself first evolved. The sources do not agree. The 2024 preprint suggested the common ancestor may have evolved alongside large herbivores in the grasslands of East Africa, roughly 1.8 to 1.2 million years ago. The 2026 press materials instead describe a scenario in which the split happened as grasslands spread in South America and grazing animals expanded out of Africa. The preprint’s authors wrote plainly that they “cannot confirm the Americas are an origin” of cubensis. We are not going to pick a side the researchers have not picked.

The short answer, then, is that Psilocybe cubensis comes from a dung-loving lineage with deep African roots, and it was probably living on the dung of wild grazers somewhere for a very long time before it met a cow.

How wild cubensis became today’s strains

Everything above concerns wild populations. The cubensis in a spore syringe has a much shorter and more human history. McTaggart’s 2023 study sequenced 86 commercially available strains and found them low in genetic diversity and closely related, consistent with descent from a small set of founders. Wild Australian cubensis, by contrast, was far more varied.

That is why a named strain such as Golden Teacher is a line within one species rather than a separate organism, and why most strain origin stories rest on hobbyist accounts rather than records. Our list of every cubensis strain we carry shows how many of those histories are documented and how many are not.

What this means for spore collectors

Three practical points follow from the research.

• Every strain we sell is Psilocybe cubensis. None of our syringes is P. ochraceocentrata, and the new species does not change what any of them are.
• Strain names are not proof of geography. The NSS case shows that a line sold for years under a regional name could be a different species entirely. A name like “Amazonian” or “Ecuadorian” tells you what a line was called, not where its DNA came from.
• Spores alone will not settle it. Cubensis spores are smooth, purple-brown and about 11 to 17 by 7 to 11 micrometers, and closely related species overlap. The African species was recognized by DNA, not by a microscope. Our guide to what mushroom spores are covers what spores can and cannot tell you.

The legal position is unchanged too. Psilocybe spores contain no psilocybin or psilocin and are legal to buy for microscopy in 46 states. California and Florida restrict them, Georgia and Idaho ban them, and we do not ship to those four states. Laws change, so check your own state in our state-by-state legal guide.

Frequently asked questions

Where was Psilocybe cubensis first found?

It was first described from Cuba in 1906 by the American mycologist Franklin Sumner Earle, under the name Stropharia cubensis. Cuba is where it was first recorded by science, not necessarily where the species began.

Where does Psilocybe cubensis come from originally?

Nobody knows for certain. Its closest known wild relative lives in southern Africa, and the two species split about 1.5 million years ago. Researchers have not settled whether cubensis itself first evolved in Africa, the Americas or somewhere else.

Is Psilocybe cubensis native to Africa?

Its closest known wild relative is. The African mushrooms once identified as cubensis turned out in the 2026 study to be a separate species, Psilocybe ochraceocentrata. Where cubensis itself first evolved has not been settled.

What is Psilocybe ochraceocentrata?

It is a dung-loving Psilocybe from the grasslands of Zimbabwe and South Africa, named for the ochre-yellow center of its cap. It last shared a common ancestor with cubensis about 1.5 million years ago.

When was the African species discovered?

It was first collected in Zimbabwe in 2013, reported in a bioRxiv preprint in December 2024 and formally published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in March 2026.

Did cattle bring Psilocybe cubensis to the Americas?

That was the long-standing theory. The new split date makes it less likely that cattle carried the species there around 1500, but researchers have not proven where it originated. Today cattle dung is where it most often grows.

Is the new African species sold as a spore syringe?

We do not sell it, and none of our syringes contains it. A hobby line called “Natal Super Strength” or “Transkei” appears to be this species, according to the DNA evidence in the study.

Can you tell cubensis from its African relative under a microscope?

Not reliably. The two were separated by DNA sequencing, and their spores are similar in size and color. Cap color, especially the ochre-yellow center, is one field difference the authors describe.

Sources

• Bradshaw A.J., Sharp C., Van Der Merwe B., Tremble K.S., Dentinger B.T.M. (2026). “Discovery of the closest free-living relative of the domesticated ‘magic mushroom’ Psilocybe cubensis in Africa.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 293(2066):20252270. doi:10.1098/rspb.2025.2270
• The same study as a preprint, bioRxiv (December 2024). doi:10.1101/2024.12.03.626483
• Stellenbosch University, “New African species confirms evolutionary origin of magic mushrooms” (March 2026). su.ac.za
• Bega S., “Spore secrets: African ‘magic mushroom’ finally reveals its origins,” Mail & Guardian, 14 March 2026. mg.co.za
• Paul A., “New psychedelic fungus rewrites origins of magic mushrooms,” Popular Science (March 2026). popsci.com
• de Kruijff P., “Newly named psychedelic fungus points to African origins of world’s most popular ‘magic mushroom’,” ABC News (Australia), December 2024. abc.net.au
• McTaggart A.R. et al. (2023). “Domestication through clandestine cultivation constrained genetic diversity in magic mushrooms relative to naturalized populations.” Current Biology 33(23):5147–5159. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2023.10.059
• University of Queensland release on the McTaggart study, via ScienceDaily (December 2023). sciencedaily.com
• Earle F.S. (1906). Original description of Stropharia cubensis from Cuba; distribution and habitat summarized in “Psilocybe cubensis,” Wikipedia. wikipedia.org