The 25,000-Year-Old Teeth That Just Rewrote The History Of Human Drug Use

The Sulawesi evidence does not resolve this debate.

But it adds a data point: the desire for what arecoline provides — the stimulation, the analgesia, the altered physiological state — drove repeated use despite physical cost, 25,000 years ago, in a context that predates civilization, agriculture, and all the social complexities that modern theories sometimes invoke to explain drug use.

Whatever humans want from altered consciousness, they wanted it before they built cities.

Before they farmed.