Scientists Discover the Earliest Evidence of Drug Use in Really Old Teeth

Humans have dabbled with mind-altering substances for thousands of years. Our ancestors imbibed fermented alcoholic drinks like beer and mead, and experimented with psychedelic ayahuasca and the opiates found in poppies.

But in a breakthrough, archaeologists have pushed the timeline of human drug use back further than ever before by studying teeth that belonged to a hunter-gatherer who lived in Indonesia sometime from 16,000 to 25,000 years ago.

The individual’s molars, which were found in a cave on the island of Sulawesi, are marked with deep grooves that were most likely left by incessant sucking on betel nuts, which release psychoactive stimulants. Betel nut, also known as areca nut, is still chewed by more than today.

Previously, the oldest documented evidence of drug use was beer brewed in Israel some 13,000 years ago. That means the new discovery pushes the timeline of pharmacological experimentation back by 3,000 to 12,000 years, marking “a significant shift in our understanding of human drug history,” according to in the journal Science Advances.

“Human use of psychoactive plants, in particular, was a lot more common in the ancient past than we can appreciate at the moment,” said Adam Brumm, a professor of archaeology in the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University who led the study. “I think it was probably a very deeply rooted aspect of human behavior,” he added.