Beginning in 2001, the Austrian anthropologist Bernd Brabec de Mori spent six years living in the western Amazon. He first arrived as a backpacker, returned to do a master’s thesis on ayahuasca songs, and eventually did a PhD on the music of eight Indigenous peoples in the region. Along the way, he married a woman of the local Shipibo tribe and settled down.

“I did not have a lot of money,” he told me, “so I had to make my living there.” He became a teacher. He built a house. He and his wife had children. That rare experience of joining the community, he said, forced him to realise that many of the assumptions he had picked up as an anthropologist were wrong.

Like most outsiders, Brabec de Mori arrived in Peru thinking that ayahuasca had been used in the western Amazon for thousands of years. This is the standard narrative; look up resources on ayahuasca, and you’re bound to run into it. “Ayahuasca has been used in the Peruvian Amazon for millennia, long before the Spanish came to Peru, before the Incan empire was formed, before history,” states the website of the Ayahuasca Foundation, an organisation founded by a US citizen that offers ayahuasca retreats.

Yet with time, Brabec de Mori came to see just how flimsy this narrative was. He discovered “a double discourse, which happens in all societies where there is tourism”, he said. “People start to tell the tourists – and I found that most Shipibo people did not distinguish tourists from researchers – the stories they think are interesting for them and not what they really live with.”

His research showed just how large the discrepancy was. He discovered that, in their traditional stories about ayahuasca’s origins, many Shipibo-Konibo people said the brew came from the Kukama, one of the first peoples to be missionised and resettled during the Spanish conquest. Other peoples from the region remembered adopting it in the last 50 years. When he examined old reports of travellers, Brabec de Mori found that he could connect the historic diffusion of ayahuasca to the movements of missionaries and the spread of the rubber industry through the western Amazon.

Then there was the linguistic evidence. Peoples in the Peruvian Amazon speak a dazzling variety of languages, but their words for ayahuasca and related activities are notably alike. The same goes for their music: lullabies, love songs and festive songs are varied, yet ayahuasca songs are very similar and often sung in non-Amazonian languages, like Quechua or Spanish. These patterns led him to conclude that ayahuasca hasn’t been in the western Amazon for millennia. Rather, it seems to have arrived and spread much more recently.