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

The Sulawesi study establishes a minimum age for direct physical evidence of habitual drug use: 16,000 to 25,000 years.

But how old is human drug use, really?

This question cannot be answered from the available evidence, but it is worth thinking about.

The cognitive capacity to identify plants with psychoactive properties, to learn from experience what effects they produce, to transmit that knowledge to others, and to develop habits of use is present in fully modern humans.

Anatomically modern humans — with brains like ours — have been in existence for at least 300,000 years.

Behaviorally modern humans — displaying the full suite of symbolic behavior including art, language, and complex social organization — have been producing evidence of their modernity for at least 60,000 to 80,000 years, and probably longer.