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

Habitual.

The Previous Record-Holder: Beer In The Levant

Before the Sulawesi discovery, the oldest solid chemical evidence for human drug use was the 13,000-year-old beer brewing residues identified at a site in Israel.

The site is Raqefet Cave in the Mount Carmel area of northern Israel, and the evidence was published in 2018.

Researchers found large stone mortars and associated residues at the site that they attributed to the brewing of a fermented grain beverage — an early form of beer — by the Natufian people, the hunter-gatherer culture that preceded the development of agriculture in the Levant.

The Natufian were a transitional people: they lived in semi-permanent settlements, harvested wild cereals, and appear to have been engaged in experiments with plant management that eventually led to agriculture.