Who discovered Ayahuasca?

It’s a mystery who learned to combine the two ingredients necessary for an ayahuasca brew (ayahuasca vine and chakruna leaf). Individually, both plants are more or less inert. In the Amazon Rainforest there are approximately 80,000 catalogued leafy plant species, of which as many as 10,000 are vines. Neither the vine nor the leaf is especially distinguished in appearance. Yet the healers of the Amazon, acting as archaic psycho-pharmacologists, somehow knew how to use one particular species of vine and one particular species of leaf to make a psychoactive brew.

There are many different creation stories told by indigenous groups about how ayahuasca first came to be. For the most part, these stories involve some form of communication from the plants/spirits to the ancestors who were so closely connected to them. These communications would often come through in dreams, in the form of specific sets of instructions on how to locate the ingredients necessary and how to prepare them.