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

The Sulawesi betel nut study is the most dramatic challenge yet to the farming-origins narrative, because it pushes the evidence more than 10,000 years before any farming in the region and documents not casual use but habitual, sustained, repeated use that wore through enamel and left chemical traces in the teeth.

The narrative that emerges from the accumulating evidence is different from the old model: humans have been using mind-altering plants for as long as they have had the cognitive sophistication to identify which plants produce which effects and to develop the behaviors that maximize those effects.

This appears to have happened in multiple independent locations, with multiple different plants, across the full range of the modern human dispersal.

The impulse to alter consciousness — or to use plants for their pain-relieving, stimulant, or euphoria-producing effects — is not a byproduct of agriculture.