Three Molars And What They Said

In the karst lowlands of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, in a limestone cave called Leang Bulu Bettue, a person died somewhere between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago.

What survived of this individual was almost nothing: a fragment of upper jaw, and three molars.

When Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, first examined those three molars, he could not immediately account for what he was seeing.

Each tooth carried a smooth, rounded groove running around it — a groove that had no obvious explanation from diet or ordinary wear.

Something had been clenched in the mouth and worked against each tooth, year after year, with enough pressure and persistence to wear through the enamel in a very specific pattern.

The teeth were catalogued as Maros-LBB-1a.

They are, at present, the only human skeletal element ever recovered from the Pleistocene of Sulawesi — the Ice Age deposits of an island that covers more than 174,000 square kilometers.

One jaw fragment.

Three teeth.

And a mystery that would take years of analysis to resolve.

The resolution, published in Science Advances on September 9, 2026, is one of the more startling findings in recent archaeological chemistry: the grooves were produced by repeatedly sucking on betel nuts — the seeds of the areca palm — and chemical analysis of the dental tissue confirmed it.

Traces of arecoline, the primary psychoactive alkaloid in betel nuts, were detected in both that ancient jaw and in the teeth of a second individual from a different Sulawesi site dating to 6,300 to 7,600 years ago.

The Sulawesi forager who lived between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago had been chasing a psychoactive buzz — or something very like it — tens of thousands of years before anyone planted the first field of crops.

This is the oldest direct physical evidence for habitual human drug use ever found.

By a significant margin.

The previous record-holder — 13,000-year-old beer brewing residues from Israel — has just been beaten by at least 3,000 years.

If the older end of the Sulawesi dating range is correct, the gap is more than 10,000 years.