The oldest direct physical evidence and the actual origin of the behavior are two different things.

Whatever the Sulawesi forager learned from — whether they learned it from other people, discovered it independently, or inherited it from a tradition that stretched back further — those prior instances would have left no trace in the archaeological record.

The Old Assumption: Drugs And Agriculture

For most of the twentieth century, a specific narrative about the origins of human drug use dominated scientific and popular thinking: people began using mind-altering substances when they became farmers, because farming created the surplus and the settled conditions in which fermentation, cultivation of psychoactive plants, and other drug-producing activities became practical.

This narrative had a certain logic to it.