Before farming, the argument went, hunter-gatherers were too busy surviving to engage in the cultivation or elaborate processing of psychoactive plants.

The cognitive overhead and resource requirements of drug production required the surplus that only agriculture could provide.

The evidence has been accumulating for decades that this narrative is wrong.

The 13,000-year-old beer from Raqefet Cave was one challenge to it: the Natufian brewers were hunter-gatherers, not farmers, yet they were already brewing beer.

Studies of ancient peyote use in the American Southwest have produced dates of around 5,700 years ago for chemical evidence of mescaline in the context of forager groups who predated or were contemporary with early plant management in the region.

Ancient cannabis use has been documented in several contexts that predate its cultivation as a crop.