The study notes that the findings have implications for the study of addiction, and this is worth developing because it is one of the dimensions of the discovery that extends beyond purely archaeological interest.

Modern addiction research is concerned with understanding the deep drivers of substance use disorders — the neural mechanisms, the developmental factors, the genetic predispositions, and the environmental contexts that together determine whether an individual becomes addicted to a substance and how that addiction develops and is maintained.

One of the central questions in addiction research is the extent to which addiction is a “disease of civilization” — a product of the specific stresses, social disconnections, and supply conditions of modern urban life — versus a biological phenomenon rooted in very basic features of human and mammalian neurophysiology.

The Sulawesi evidence speaks to this question by demonstrating that the pharmacological dynamics of addiction — the reinforcement of use through pain relief, the persistence of habitual use despite physical harm — were operating on human beings in a pre-agricultural, small-scale forager context.