The Sulawesi study is one data point in a much longer story about the relationship between humans and plants — a relationship that is fundamental to human biology, human culture, and human survival in ways that are easy to underestimate.

Humans have been in intimate relationship with plants for the entirety of their evolutionary history.

Plants are the foundation of most food chains, the sources of most medicines, the raw materials of most technologies, and — as the Sulawesi evidence demonstrates — the sources of the psychoactive substances that humans have used throughout their history to alter consciousness, relieve pain, and seek pleasure.

The specific plants that humans have used for psychoactive purposes are numerous and geographically diverse: the areca palm in Southeast Asia, the tobacco plant in the Americas, the coca plant in South America, the coffee and tea plants in Africa and Asia, the opium poppy in Eurasia, the cannabis plant across much of the world, the peyote cactus in North America.