Tomb in Siberia reveals humans were using cannabis 2800 years ago — SkimNews
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- Tunnug 1 preserved human hair dated to the same period as the seeds; analysis detected cannabinol, a compound produced when THC oxidizes, plus THC signatures, providing the earliest definitive evidence of psychoactive effects in an ancient human.
- Gino Caspari and colleagues at the University of Bern recovered nearly 1,000 whole cannabis seeds from the mound’s central excavation trench; radiocarbon dating placed the deposit around the start of the 8th century BC, or 2,800 years ago.
- Tunnug 1 was a royal burial mound dating to the Scythian era, and it also contained the remains of dozens of sacrificed horses and scattered human bones, adding evidence of ritual and possible human sacrifice to the funerary setting.
- Gino Caspari said the find was probably tied to a ritual funerary process, suggested it might have produced a religious high, and proposed the darker possibility that cannabis sedated people selected for sacrifice.
- Adam Brumm called the sedation hypothesis “intriguing” but “highly speculative,” and said cannabis drug use may extend much further back than the archaeological record because uncultivated plants could have thrived as “camp followers” around settlements.
- Cannabis sativa was likely domesticated in China about 12,000 years ago, according to genomic studies; hemp artifacts in China and Japan date to 7,500 years ago, and chemical traces on Chinese wooden braziers had implied cannabis smoking in funeral rites about 2,500 years ago.
Why it matters: The find moves the firm archaeological baseline for psychoactive cannabis 300 years earlier and ties it to a Scythian royal burial with nearly 1,000 seeds, dozens of sacrificed horses and scattered human bones. For researchers of ritual and substance use, the concrete gain is a dated chemical case, while the proposed use to sedate sacrifice victims remains explicitly speculative.
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