These are effects that would have been genuinely useful for foragers who needed to maintain alertness while hunting or tracking, remember complex spatial information about food sources and routes, and sustain effort over long foraging days.

This cognitive dimension of arecoline’s effects has led to modern research interest in the potential of muscarinic agonists as cognitive enhancers and as treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, where loss of cholinergic function (including muscarinic receptor function) is a key feature.

Arecoline itself is not therapeutically used because of its other effects and its addictive potential, but it has informed the search for more selective muscarinic agonists that might provide cognitive benefits without the side effects.

The ancient Sulawesi foragers were, in their own way, discovering the cognitive effects of muscarinic receptor stimulation — effects that pharmaceutical researchers are still trying to harness therapeutically today.