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

The honest answer to “how old is human drug use, really?” is: older than 25,000 years.

How much older, we cannot say.

The 25,000-year figure is the floor of what direct evidence can currently establish.

The ceiling — the upper bound set by the evolutionary history of our species — is something like 300,000 years.

The truth is somewhere in that range.

And the Sulawesi evidence has just pushed the lower bound of what the direct evidence can tell us further toward the upper bound than it had ever been before.

Three Teeth — And Everything They Carried