GENEVA (AP) — People may have gotten addicted to cannabis earlier than previously thought — at least 2,800 years ago, a new study suggests.
Archaeologists who carried out excavations at a monumental tomb in Siberia say they have found evidence of the first known use of cannabis for psychoactive purposes.
Results suggest at least cannabis use 300 years earlier than previously known use in neighboring China.
The use of ancient drugs has long intrigued researchers. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote about people in Central Asia smoking cannabis around 440 BC, and recent archaeologists have found the seeds in tombs in its highlands.
The team from Germany, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland said analysis of hair in the royal tomb where cannabis seeds were discovered sheds new light on the plant’s role in ancient societies.
“It is extremely rare that we have preserved both plant parts and human soft tissues containing active compounds in the same context,” said co-author Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the University of Bern.
It is unclear whether the cannabis was consumed by inhalation or ingestion, he said.
Excavations took place starting in 2017 at a large mound at the Tunnug 1 site in southern Siberia’s Uyuk Valley, which is home to one of the earliest monumental tombs showing the material culture of the Scythians, ancient nomads who migrated from Central Asia to southern Russia and Ukraine.
The team, deployed “basically in the middle of nowhere,” lived in tents for months and faced a spring to fall season marked by swamps, snowstorms, frosts and swarms of mosquitoes. Herds of horses ran freely across the grassy steppe.
The most important objects at the site include weapons in the burials, horse equipment and animal motifs. But the team “struck gold” as they also found tiny black dots that turned out to be cannabis seeds as well as preserved human hair, Caspari said.
“As an archaeologist, it’s only very often that you get the opportunity to test someone who has been dead for almost 3,000 years,” he said.
Radiocarbon dating of some of the more than 1,000 seeds helped establish the time of their origin, and “they’re not there by accident” but deposited in the grave, suggesting the plant material had significance in the community, he said.
The results were published Thursday in the journal Science.
Not all independent experts were convinced.
The hair analysis “is scientifically weak” and there is not enough evidence to say whether cannabis was used, Volker Auwaerter, head of the forensic toxicology section at the University Medical Center in Freiburg, Germany, wrote in an email.
“For a central part of the study, the paper falls far short of what would have been possible,” Auwaerter said. “This is important because the hair data carries the main claims of the summary (consumption of cannabis and use for its psychoactive properties).”
Today, researchers do not consider ancient accounts trustworthy without corroborating evidence. Because the cannabis plant has other uses — the seeds are pressed for oil and the fibers are used to make fabrics — their presence is not enough to confirm drug use.
Auwaerter, who was not part of the study, said the data did not separate consumption from external exposure: In other words, the hair could have contained traces of the grass simply by being buried with it. He said a laboratory test involving forensic toxicology expertise would have been advisable and easy to arrange.
But Elisa Guerra Doce of the University of Valladolid in Spain, who has written about the use of consciousness-altering substances in European prehistory, said toxicological analysis of hair was not new to archeology and had been used to identify the use of psychoactive substances. She did not participate in the study.
In an email, she thanked the authors for showing, through their methodology, that “cannabis was not simply placed as a funeral offering but was in fact consumed by individuals associated with the funeral rite.”
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Jenne reported from Vienna, Austria.
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