The cave paintings at the site and others in the Maros-Pangkep karst are tens of thousands of years old — people had been living in and around these caves since well before the Last Glacial Maximum.

The knowledge of the local landscape, including the areca palms growing in the forest, would have been accumulated over generations of intimate contact with the same environment.

This depth of landscape knowledge is part of the context for the betel nut discovery.

The foragers were not naive experimenters stumbling across an unfamiliar plant.

They lived in an environment they had known, through accumulated cultural knowledge, for thousands of years.

The areca palm would have been part of their landscape vocabulary — a known tree, with known fruits, whose seeds had properties that were known and sought.