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

Several factors explain the gap.

First, the expectation was wrong.

The working assumption in the field was that betel nut use was an agricultural period practice — associated with the spread of farming and the cultivation of the areca palm as a crop.

The Bronze Age Thailand evidence fit this assumption: it postdated the development of agriculture in Southeast Asia and was consistent with the hypothesis that betel nut use followed agricultural cultivation of the plant.

Second, the detection method was not obvious.