Sulawesi Skeletons Show Earliest Human Drug Use, 25,000 Years Ago — SkimNews
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- Adam Brumm of Griffith University and colleagues found two Sulawesi skeletons dated to roughly 7,000 and 16,000–25,000 years old, both showing deep, rounded tooth grooves so severe some exposed the dental pulp.
- Chemical analysis of the remaining teeth detected arecoline, the psychoactive compound in betel nuts (seeds of the Areca catechu palm), confirming the foragers routinely chewed the nuts — not stones or tools — for their narcotic effect.
- Brumm personally tested a betel nut, describing the taste as intensely bitter and astringent with a numbing effect; lab tests soaking nuts in artificial saliva showed enough arecoline leached out to produce a mild high.
- Betel nuts rank as the world's fourth most widely used psychoactive substance after alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine, with an estimated one-tenth of the global population chewing them today — the study suggests this habit stretches back to the Upper Paleolithic.
- Researchers theorize the foragers sucked on whole nuts before later users discovered mixing them with slaked lime to intensify the high, and may have gotten trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of treating nut-induced tooth pain with more nut-sucking.
- Elisa Guerra-Doce of the University of Valladolid called the findings "direct evidence of the antiquity of human drug use," noting they predate the previously oldest known psychoactive traditions (fermented drinks like barley beer at ~13,000 years ago) by up to 12,000 years.
Why it matters: This pushes the documented timeline of human psychoactive substance use back by as much as 12,000 years, with two Sulawesi skeletons dated to 16,000–25,000 years ago directly tested for the drug compound rather than inferred indirectly. Researchers and Guerra-Doce now have chemical — not just circumstantial — evidence that a habit still practiced by an estimated 10% of humanity today has roots in the Upper Paleolithic.
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