Three Molars And What They Said<\/p>\n
In the karst lowlands of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, in a limestone cave called Leang Bulu Bettue, a person died somewhere between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago.<\/p>\n
What survived of this individual was almost nothing: a fragment of upper jaw, and three molars.<\/p>\n
When Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, first examined those three molars, he could not immediately account for what he was seeing.<\/p>\n
Each tooth carried a smooth, rounded groove running around it \u2014 a groove that had no obvious explanation from diet or ordinary wear.<\/p>\n
Something had been clenched in the mouth and worked against each tooth, year after year, with enough pressure and persistence to wear through the enamel in a very specific pattern.<\/p>\n
The teeth were catalogued as Maros-LBB-1a.<\/p>\n
They are, at present, the only human skeletal element ever recovered from the Pleistocene of Sulawesi \u2014 the Ice Age deposits of an island that covers more than 174,000 square kilometers.<\/p>\n
One jaw fragment.<\/p>\n
Three teeth.<\/p>\n
And a mystery that would take years of analysis to resolve.<\/p>\n
The resolution, published in Science Advances on September 9, 2026, is one of the more startling findings in recent archaeological chemistry: the grooves were produced by repeatedly sucking on betel nuts \u2014 the seeds of the areca palm \u2014 and chemical analysis of the dental tissue confirmed it.<\/p>\n
Traces of arecoline, the primary psychoactive alkaloid in betel nuts, were detected in both that ancient jaw and in the teeth of a second individual from a different Sulawesi site dating to 6,300 to 7,600 years ago.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi forager who lived between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago had been chasing a psychoactive buzz \u2014 or something very like it \u2014 tens of thousands of years before anyone planted the first field of crops.<\/p>\n
This is the oldest direct physical evidence for habitual human drug use ever found.<\/p>\n
By a significant margin.<\/p>\n
The previous record-holder \u2014 13,000-year-old beer brewing residues from Israel \u2014 has just been beaten by at least 3,000 years.<\/p>\n
If the older end of the Sulawesi dating range is correct, the gap is more than 10,000 years.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What follows is the story of how this discovery was made, what the evidence actually shows, and what it means for our understanding of the deep human relationship with mind-altering plants.<\/p>\n
What Betel Nut Actually Is<\/p>\n
Betel nut is the world’s fourth most widely used psychoactive substance.<\/p>\n
Only alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine rank above it.<\/p>\n
By those metrics, it should be well-known to anyone writing about drugs or public health.<\/p>\n
But for many people in Europe, North America, and parts of East Asia, betel nut is essentially unknown.<\/p>\n
It is culturally invisible in the West in a way that reflects both the geographic concentration of its use and the particular blind spots of Western-centric coverage of global health.<\/p>\n
Roughly one in ten people on Earth \u2014 around 600 to 700 million individuals, depending on the estimate \u2014 currently uses betel nut regularly.<\/p>\n
The practice is concentrated in South and Southeast Asia, in the Pacific Islands, and in parts of East Africa.<\/p>\n
In India, Taiwan, Papua New Guinea, Bangladesh, and many other countries and territories, betel nut is as ordinary and pervasive as cigarettes in mid-twentieth-century America.<\/p>\n
The nut itself is technically not a nut at all.<\/p>\n
It is the seed of the areca palm, Areca catechu, a slender tropical tree native to Southeast Asia.<\/p>\n
The seed is hard and fibrous, round to oval, typically 10 to 20 millimeters in diameter \u2014 about the size of a large marble.<\/p>\n
The traditional preparation of betel nut \u2014 the form in which it has been used across Southeast Asia for thousands of years in the historical period \u2014 is the “betel quid.” The seed is shelled and sliced or crushed, then wrapped with a leaf of the betel vine (Piper betle, a different plant entirely \u2014 the “betel” in “betel nut” comes from the Portuguese word for the leaf, not the nut) and mixed with calcium hydroxide, commonly called slaked lime.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The lime is a chemical activator: it changes the pH environment in the mouth, altering the chemistry of arecoline extraction and intensifying both the effect and the production of the characteristic bright red saliva that stains the teeth and gums of regular betel quid users.<\/p>\n
The effects of the betel quid: a stimulant high, comparable by many accounts to a strong cup of coffee but with specific physiological signatures.<\/p>\n
Increased heart rate.<\/p>\n
A feeling of warmth and alertness.<\/p>\n
Mild euphoria.<\/p>\n
The effect begins within minutes and lasts roughly an hour.<\/p>\n
Regular users report that it suppresses hunger and fatigue \u2014 properties that make it particularly attractive in contexts of physical labor and food scarcity.<\/p>\n
The health consequences of regular betel quid use are severe.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The combination of arecoline, the lime, and the betel leaf is strongly associated with oral submucous fibrosis \u2014 a precancerous condition in which scar tissue progressively restricts the opening of the mouth.<\/p>\n
It is associated with dramatically elevated rates of oral cancer, esophageal cancer, and pharyngeal cancer.<\/p>\n
It causes progressive staining and destruction of the teeth.<\/p>\n
It is physically addictive.<\/p>\n
In the countries where betel quid use is most prevalent, oral cancer rates are far higher than in countries where it is not used.<\/p>\n
The World Health Organization classifies betel nut (areca nut) as a Group 1 carcinogen \u2014 the same category as tobacco and alcohol \u2014 based on sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity in humans.<\/p>\n
This is the substance that someone on Sulawesi was using between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Not in the form of a processed quid \u2014 the Pleistocene forager who wore those distinctive grooves into their molars was doing something different, something that left a completely different kind of dental damage from what modern betel quid users exhibit.<\/p>\n
They were sucking the nut whole.<\/p>\n
The Study And How It Was Done<\/p>\n
The paper that changed the timeline of human drug use was the product of an international research team led by Brumm, working through Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE).<\/p>\n
His co-authors included Melandri Vlok, who conducted the dental wear analysis; Roger L.<\/p>\n
Papke, who led the pharmacological experiments; Carney D.<\/p>\n
Matheson, who conducted the chemical analysis; and a large team of Indonesian archaeologists and researchers from institutions including Hasanuddin University in Makassar, who have been excavating these Sulawesi sites for years.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The study combined three distinct lines of evidence:<\/p>\n
First, dental wear analysis.<\/p>\n
Vlok examined the distinctive rounded grooves in the teeth of both individuals and documented them as a previously unrecognized form of dental pathology.<\/p>\n
The grooves were not cavities.<\/p>\n
They were not the wear patterns typical of processing tough plant foods.<\/p>\n
They were smooth, rounded, hollowed-out channels that ran around the tooth at a specific angle \u2014 the angle consistent with holding a round object in the back of the mouth, against the molar, for extended periods.<\/p>\n
The size of the objects that would produce this pattern: 10 to 20 millimeters in diameter.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Betel nuts on Sulawesi are 10 to 20 millimeters in diameter.<\/p>\n
The pattern appeared in both individuals, separated by more than 10,000 years.<\/p>\n
That separation is itself significant: the same distinctive, unusual wear pattern appearing in two individuals at the same general location but separated by a vast span of time points to a persistent, culturally transmitted behavior, not a random idiosyncrasy.<\/p>\n
Second, chemical analysis.<\/p>\n
Matheson and colleagues extracted dental tissue from the ancient teeth and subjected it to chemical analysis looking for traces of arecoline.<\/p>\n
This is technically demanding work: arecoline is a small, volatile molecule that might not be expected to survive in fossilized dental tissue over tens of thousands of years.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The fact that detectable traces were found in both individuals is a significant result.<\/p>\n
The detection of arecoline in ancient dental tissue is described by Brumm as “as close to a smoking gun as we can get.” Arecoline is the compound that produces betel nut’s psychoactive effects.<\/p>\n
Its presence in the teeth of Ice Age foragers on Sulawesi is direct chemical evidence that those people were exposed to areca nuts \u2014 that the nuts were in their mouths, releasing their active compounds into the surrounding tissues.<\/p>\n
Third, pharmacological experiments.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This is the element of the study that is perhaps the most creative.<\/p>\n
Brumm’s team needed to answer a specific question: could sucking a whole, unprocessed areca nut \u2014 without the slaked lime that modern users add, which intensifies arecoline extraction \u2014 actually release enough arecoline to have a physiological effect?<\/p>\n
To find out, they soaked intact betel nuts in artificial saliva and then tested the resulting solution against a panel of cloned human receptors expressed in frog egg cells \u2014 the standard preparation for testing how compounds interact with human neurochemistry.<\/p>\n
The result was clear: yes.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sucking an intact areca nut releases enough arecoline to trigger responses in the relevant human brain receptors.<\/p>\n
The ancient foragers who were holding these nuts in their mouths were getting a real pharmacological effect.<\/p>\n
Not as intense as the modern processed quid, but real.<\/p>\n
“But our team conducted experiments in which we soaked betel nuts in artificial saliva and tested the resulting broths against a panel of cloned human receptors expressed in frog egg cells, including specialized proteins that act as molecular switches, regulating neural activity,” Brumm said in the Griffith University press release announcing the findings.<\/p>\n
The three lines of evidence together \u2014 the distinctive dental wear, the chemical detection of arecoline, and the experimental demonstration of pharmacological activity from unprocessed nuts \u2014 constitute a convergent case that the paper’s title states directly: betel nut sucking is the earliest recorded evidence for the habitual use of a neuroactive plant drug.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Older Specimen: Maros-LBB-1a<\/p>\n
The older of the two individuals \u2014 the one whose remains come from Leang Bulu Bettue and are dated to somewhere between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago \u2014 is the record-holder, and their remains deserve specific attention.<\/p>\n
The jaw fragment and three molars are all that is preserved.<\/p>\n
The individual is catalogued as Maros-LBB-1a in the scientific literature.<\/p>\n
This designation reflects the Maros-Pangkep karst region of South Sulawesi where the cave is located, the Leang Bulu Bettue (LBB) cave specifically, and the sequential numbering of specimens.<\/p>\n
The individual was an adult.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Based on the state of the molars \u2014 third molars present and worn, indicating full maturity \u2014 and other skeletal indicators, the researchers estimated an age at death of around 35 years.<\/p>\n
This is consistent with the age structure of prehistoric hunter-gatherer populations, where reaching the mid-thirties represented substantial survival.<\/p>\n
This person had lived long enough to develop the distinctive dental wear that told the story.<\/p>\n
The dating of the deposit \u2014 25,000 to 16,000 years ago \u2014 is established by multiple methods applied to the excavation levels at Leang Bulu Bettue.<\/p>\n
Radiocarbon dating, optically stimulated luminescence dating, and stratigraphic analysis have been applied to the cave’s deposits in prior excavations at the site.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specimen falls within a specific stratigraphic level that those dating methods place in the Late Pleistocene.<\/p>\n
The spread of the date \u2014 25,000 to 16,000 years \u2014 is standard archaeological uncertainty, not a failure of dating.<\/p>\n
The specific position within a stratigraphic level provides a range rather than a point date.<\/p>\n
The best estimate for the age of the individual falls somewhere within that range, and the paper is careful to represent it as such.<\/p>\n
This careful handling of the dating uncertainty is important for interpreting the discovery accurately.<\/p>\n
The headline-grabbing “25,000 years ago” represents the older end of the range \u2014 the maximum age consistent with the evidence.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The minimum is 16,000 years ago, which would still be the oldest direct evidence of drug use by a substantial margin.<\/p>\n
Whether the individual lived closer to 25,000 years ago or closer to 16,000 years ago is not determined by the available evidence.<\/p>\n
What is determined is that they predated agriculture on Sulawesi by a significant margin regardless \u2014 agriculture reached Sulawesi only within the last 4,000 years or so, meaning that even the most conservative dating of this specimen places the betel nut use well before farming.<\/p>\n
The Younger Specimen: CPL-R2a<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The second individual \u2014 catalogued as CPL-R2a \u2014 was excavated from a different site, Leang Cappalombo 1, located approximately 33 kilometers east of Leang Bulu Bettue.<\/p>\n
CPL-R2a is a much more complete skeleton than Maros-LBB-1a, which is one of the reasons the dental wear documentation could be done more thoroughly for this individual.<\/p>\n
CPL-R2a is dated to approximately 6,300 to 7,600 years ago \u2014 the Holocene period, after the Ice Age had ended but before agriculture arrived on the island.<\/p>\n
This individual was male.<\/p>\n
He was an adult, again estimated to be around 35 years of age.<\/p>\n
He was associated with what researchers call the Toalean technocomplex \u2014 a distinctive pre-Neolithic foraging culture with deep roots in South Sulawesi, characterized by specific tool types and subsistence patterns that have been documented at multiple sites in the region.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The dental wear on CPL-R2a is even more dramatic than on the older individual.<\/p>\n
The Archaeology.org account describes his teeth as “worn right to the root in some areas” \u2014 a level of degradation that would have exposed the pulp chamber, the nerve-filled core of the tooth.<\/p>\n
Exposed pulp means pain.<\/p>\n
Severe, chronic, unavoidable pain every time the tooth was exposed to anything.<\/p>\n
This observation is one of the most important in the entire study, because it opens a specific interpretive possibility: the pain produced by the dental destruction may have become the driver of continued betel nut use.<\/p>\n
Here is how the feedback loop would have worked: The forager begins using betel nut for some initial reason \u2014 relief of a toothache, social behavior, curiosity, ritual.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The sustained habit of sucking the hard nut wears into the enamel, eventually exposing the pulp.<\/p>\n
The exposed pulp creates intense pain.<\/p>\n
Arecoline, the psychoactive compound in the nut, also has analgesic properties \u2014 it numbs pain.<\/p>\n
So continuing to suck the betel nut numbs the very pain that the nut itself has caused.<\/p>\n
The researchers describe this as “a cycle of continued habitual use” \u2014 a feedback loop that mirrors the pharmacological dynamics of modern addiction, in which the substance both causes the problem and temporarily relieves it.<\/p>\n
This cycle has an eerily familiar quality.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The forager on Sulawesi, 6,300 to 7,600 years ago, with their teeth worn to the root, continuing to use the substance that had damaged those teeth because the substance temporarily numbed the resulting pain \u2014 this is a description of addiction in everything but the modern clinical terminology.<\/p>\n
How Betel Nut Was Being Used Then Versus Now<\/p>\n
One of the most important distinctions in the Sulawesi study is the difference between how the ancient foragers were using betel nut and how it is used in modern populations.<\/p>\n
Modern betel nut use \u2014 across the South and Southeast Asian, Pacific, and East African populations where it is common \u2014 involves the prepared betel quid: sliced or crushed areca nut seed, betel vine leaf, and calcium hydroxide (slaked lime), sometimes with tobacco and other additions.<\/p>\n
This preparation is chewed rather than simply held in the mouth.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The chewing breaks down the nut and mixes it with the lime, releasing arecoline more rapidly and fully.<\/p>\n
The distinctive bright red saliva produced by the lime reaction is one of the most visible markers of betel quid use in populations where it is common.<\/p>\n
The ancient Sulawesi foragers were apparently doing something different.<\/p>\n
They were not producing the betel quid \u2014 they did not have slaked lime, and the dental wear pattern is inconsistent with chewing in the way modern betel quid users chew.<\/p>\n
The rounded grooves in the ancient teeth are specifically produced by holding a round, hard object in the back of the mouth against the molar \u2014 not by the grinding and crushing action of chewing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What the foragers appear to have been doing is sucking the intact, whole nut.<\/p>\n
Holding it in the mouth for extended periods, working it against the molar, allowing slow diffusion of arecoline through saliva across the nut’s exterior surface.<\/p>\n
This is an important distinction for several reasons.<\/p>\n
First, it changes the chemistry.<\/p>\n
Sucking an intact nut produces a slower, lower-level release of arecoline than chewing a prepared quid.<\/p>\n
The pharmacological experiments confirmed that this produces a real effect \u2014 detectable activity at human brain receptors \u2014 but a less intense one than the modern preparation.<\/p>\n
The ancient practice was getting them high, but possibly at a lower level than modern users achieve.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Second, it changes the health consequences.<\/p>\n
The modern betel quid, processed with lime, is strongly associated with oral cancer and precancerous changes.<\/p>\n
The ancient practice of sucking whole nuts would have had different chemical exposure patterns.<\/p>\n
The dental destruction it caused \u2014 the distinctive rounded grooves \u2014 is a different pathology from what modern users develop.<\/p>\n
Neither is good for the teeth, but the specific mechanisms and the specific health consequences differ.<\/p>\n
Third, it suggests that the ancient use predates the development of the specific preparation method \u2014 the quid with lime \u2014 that characterizes the historical and modern tradition.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The foragers on Sulawesi were engaging in a form of betel nut use that may represent an earlier, simpler version of the practice, before the technology of the quid was developed.<\/p>\n
Fourth, it raises the question of when and how the quid tradition developed.<\/p>\n
The leap from “suck the whole nut” to “slice the nut, mix with lime and betel leaf” is not trivial.<\/p>\n
It requires knowledge of multiple plants and their interactions, knowledge of how lime alters the chemistry of the preparation, and probably generations of experimentation.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi evidence suggests that the simpler practice of nut-sucking came first, and the elaborated quid tradition developed later \u2014 a hypothesis that the archaeological record in Southeast Asia will need to be re-examined to evaluate.<\/p>\n
Sulawesi’s Unique Archaeological Importance<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The discovery comes from Sulawesi, which is not a random location for a record-breaking archaeological finding.<\/p>\n
Sulawesi is one of the most archaeologically important islands in the world for understanding the deep prehistory of modern humans in Island Southeast Asia.<\/p>\n
In recent decades, it has produced a remarkable series of findings that have repeatedly rewritten our understanding of when humans reached this part of the world and what they were doing there.<\/p>\n
In 2019, researchers reported a cave painting at a site in the Maros-Pangkep karst \u2014 the same karst system that includes Leang Bulu Bettue \u2014 that was dated to at least 45,500 years ago.<\/p>\n
The painting depicts a warty pig, rendered in red ochre, and it is among the oldest representational art ever found.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi cave art discoveries, which have continued to produce older and older dates for figurative painting, have established the island as one of the primary locations where we can observe the earliest expressions of symbolic and artistic thinking in modern humans.<\/p>\n
In 2025, researchers published evidence of even older hominin activity on Sulawesi \u2014 stone tools dating to more than a million years ago, suggesting that earlier human relatives (possibly Homo erectus or a related species) had crossed significant water barriers to reach the island long before modern humans arrived.<\/p>\n
The specific cave where the older betel nut specimen was found \u2014 Leang Bulu Bettue \u2014 is part of this important archaeological landscape.<\/p>\n
A 2025 publication documented “a near-continuous archaeological record of Pleistocene human occupation” at Leang Bulu Bettue, indicating that the cave was used repeatedly by modern humans over an extended period.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This long record of excavation and study at the site means that the stratigraphic context for the Maros-LBB-1a specimen is well-established.<\/p>\n
The dating methods that place the jaw fragment in the 16,000 to 25,000 year range are supported by the broader stratigraphic and chronological framework developed through years of work at the site.<\/p>\n
Sulawesi’s geological situation \u2014 part of the Wallacea, the zone of islands that separates the Asian and Australian biological realms \u2014 has maintained its island status through all the sea-level changes of the Pleistocene.<\/p>\n
Unlike the continental shelves of Sundaland (the mainland Southeast Asian landmass that connected the western Indonesian islands during glacial maxima), Sulawesi was never connected to the mainland.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Reaching it always required a water crossing.<\/p>\n
This means that the modern humans whose teeth were found at Leang Bulu Bettue were the descendants of people who had successfully made ocean crossings \u2014 they were maritime people, or at least descended from maritime people, even if they themselves were living as forest and karst foragers.<\/p>\n
The Areca Palm In Southeast Asia: An Ancient Relationship<\/p>\n
The areca palm that produces the betel nut did not appear in Sulawesi by accident.<\/p>\n
The plant has a long evolutionary history in the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, and it has been part of the human landscape in this region for a very long time.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Areca catechu \u2014 the domesticated form of the areca palm whose seeds are the basis of the betel nut trade \u2014 is a cultigen, meaning it exists in its current form because of human selection and cultivation.<\/p>\n
Its wild ancestor or ancestors are found in Southeast Asian forests.<\/p>\n
The process by which wild areca palms were selected and eventually domesticated is not fully reconstructed, but it presumably involved a long period during which foragers identified and used the wild palms for their psychoactive properties before any deliberate cultivation began.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi evidence suggests that this forager relationship with the areca palm’s psychoactive properties predates domestication by at minimum many thousands of years.<\/p>\n
The individuals found at Leang Bulu Bettue and Leang Cappalombo 1 were using wild areca nuts \u2014 or at most very early stages of managed use \u2014 in the pre-agricultural period.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The distributions of wild areca species in Sulawesi and the surrounding region suggest that the island had native populations of Areca-related plants that the ancient foragers would have encountered as part of their landscape.<\/p>\n
Whether the specific nut they were using was a direct wild ancestor of Areca catechu or a related wild species is not established from the current evidence.<\/p>\n
The key point is that the relationship between humans and areca palms in Sulawesi is very old \u2014 old enough that it was part of the behavioral repertoire of Ice Age foragers long before the plant was ever cultivated.<\/p>\n
What The Teeth Said: A Detailed Look At The Dental Pathology<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The dental wear pattern documented by Vlok and the team is, by their account, a previously unrecognized form of dental pathology \u2014 something that had not been formally described in the archaeological or bioarchaeological literature before this study.<\/p>\n
This claim deserves unpacking, because it speaks to why the discovery was not made earlier.<\/p>\n
Dental pathology in ancient skeletal remains is extensively studied.<\/p>\n
Researchers have documented tooth decay, periodontal disease, enamel hypoplasias (defects in enamel formation indicating periods of growth stress), wear from grinding plant foods, wear from using teeth as tools, and numerous other forms of dental damage across thousands of ancient specimens.<\/p>\n
What no one had formally documented before this study was the specific pattern of smooth, rounded, hollowed-out grooves produced by holding a round object in the mouth over years of habitual use.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The reason is probably twofold: the pattern is genuinely unusual, and it requires the right specimen with appropriate preservation to be recognized.<\/p>\n
The two Sulawesi specimens happen to preserve teeth that clearly show this pattern.<\/p>\n
The grooves, as described across multiple reports on the study, are deep and smooth \u2014 the smoothness indicating that they were produced by the constant friction of a hard, rounded object (a whole nut, approximately 10-20 mm in diameter) against the enamel surface over a long period.<\/p>\n
The groove runs around the tooth at an angle consistent with how a person would naturally hold a nut in the back of the mouth, between the rear molars or just forward of them.<\/p>\n
The size of the object that would produce this pattern \u2014 10 to 20 millimeters \u2014 is a key diagnostic feature.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Areca nuts on Sulawesi fall squarely in this size range.<\/p>\n
Other objects of similar size that might have been held in the mouth would need to be identified and excluded.<\/p>\n
The research team’s consideration of alternative explanations for the wear pattern \u2014 other possible habits or objects \u2014 is part of the evidence that supports the betel nut hypothesis.<\/p>\n
The chemical detection of arecoline in the dental tissue is the confirmation that transforms the wear pattern from a plausible hypothesis to a supported finding.<\/p>\n
Wear alone could, in principle, result from other habits.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Wear plus arecoline traces = betel nut.<\/p>\n
In CPL-R2a, the wear was so extreme that it had reached the root in some areas.<\/p>\n
The diagram of inferred nut positions based on the dental wear pattern, published in the paper, shows where the nuts were held: pressed against the rear molars, creating the grinding groove as the nut was moved slightly while being held in place for extended periods.<\/p>\n
The pain this would have caused \u2014 once the pulp was exposed in the most severely damaged teeth \u2014 would have been constant and severe.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And yet the behavior continued.<\/p>\n
That persistence in the face of severe dental damage is itself evidence of habituation or addiction: the substance was driving continued use despite serious harm.<\/p>\n
What Arecoline Does In The Brain<\/p>\n
Understanding why ancient foragers would have sought out the effects of betel nut requires understanding what arecoline does.<\/p>\n
Arecoline is a naturally occurring alkaloid \u2014 a nitrogen-containing compound produced by plants, often as a defense against herbivores, that happens to have effects on animal nervous systems.<\/p>\n
The plant alkaloids that humans have used for their psychoactive effects across history form a large and chemically diverse group: caffeine in coffee and tea, nicotine in tobacco, cocaine in the coca plant, morphine in the opium poppy, and many others.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Arecoline belongs in this family.<\/p>\n
The specific mechanism of arecoline’s action is at the muscarinic acetylcholine receptors in the brain and peripheral nervous system.<\/p>\n
These receptors are part of the parasympathetic nervous system \u2014 the “rest and digest” branch of the autonomic nervous system \u2014 and they regulate a wide range of functions including heart rate, digestion, salivation, and cognitive processes.<\/p>\n
Arecoline is an agonist at these receptors \u2014 it activates them, mimicking the natural neurotransmitter acetylcholine.<\/p>\n
This activation produces a range of effects: increased salivation, decreased heart rate at low doses but increased heart rate at higher doses, and \u2014 most relevantly for understanding why people use it \u2014 stimulant effects on the central nervous system.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The stimulant effect of arecoline is the reason betel nut is so widely used.<\/p>\n
It creates alertness, suppresses fatigue, and produces a mild euphoria.<\/p>\n
For people engaged in physically demanding labor \u2014 agriculture, fishing, construction \u2014 the fatigue suppression is valuable.<\/p>\n
For people who need to maintain alertness under boring or taxing conditions, the stimulant effect is attractive.<\/p>\n
For people who are hungry, the hunger-suppression effect is appealing.<\/p>\n
The comparison to caffeine is apt: both are stimulant alkaloids that act through receptor systems in the brain to produce alertness and reduced fatigue.<\/p>\n
Arecoline is generally considered to have stronger effects than caffeine and a higher addiction potential, though comparing across these compounds is complicated by the different ways they are consumed and the different populations that use them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
For the Ice Age foragers of Sulawesi, the question of why they first began using the betel nut is not answered by the study.<\/p>\n
The initial motivation might have been anything: the discovery that chewing or holding the nut produced a pleasant or useful effect, the observation that someone with a toothache experienced relief from chewing on the nut (arecoline has analgesic properties), or social transmission of a behavior that was already established in the community.<\/p>\n
What the study establishes is that once the use began, it continued \u2014 consistently enough, over enough years, to wear distinctive grooves into the teeth and leave detectable chemical traces in the dental tissue.<\/p>\n
That persistence is the signature of habitual use, and the study uses that word deliberately: “habitual.” Not casual, not occasional, not opportunistic.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Habitual.<\/p>\n
The Previous Record-Holder: Beer In The Levant<\/p>\n
Before the Sulawesi discovery, the oldest solid chemical evidence for human drug use was the 13,000-year-old beer brewing residues identified at a site in Israel.<\/p>\n
The site is Raqefet Cave in the Mount Carmel area of northern Israel, and the evidence was published in 2018.<\/p>\n
Researchers found large stone mortars and associated residues at the site that they attributed to the brewing of a fermented grain beverage \u2014 an early form of beer \u2014 by the Natufian people, the hunter-gatherer culture that preceded the development of agriculture in the Levant.<\/p>\n
The Natufian were a transitional people: they lived in semi-permanent settlements, harvested wild cereals, and appear to have been engaged in experiments with plant management that eventually led to agriculture.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Raqefet Cave beer appears to have been brewed for ceremonial purposes \u2014 for feasting rituals \u2014 rather than as a daily beverage.<\/p>\n
This 13,000-year-old beer was already notable for pushing back the evidence of fermented beverage production significantly earlier than the agricultural period to which it had previously been assigned.<\/p>\n
It suggested that the relationship between humans and intoxicants was not a simple consequence of having surplus grain \u2014 you need surplus grain to brew beer at scale \u2014 but something that predated the agricultural foundation for that surplus.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi discovery pushes the timeline back much further, and in a different direction.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Where the Israel evidence was about fermentation \u2014 a specific chemical transformation of plant materials \u2014 the Sulawesi evidence is about direct use of a plant’s natural psychoactive compounds.<\/p>\n
No processing.<\/p>\n
No brewing.<\/p>\n
Just the plant, sucked directly, releasing its compounds.<\/p>\n
This is a simpler form of use, and it is consistent with the idea that the most basic human relationship with psychoactive plants \u2014 chewing, sucking, or otherwise ingesting them directly to get their effects \u2014 is very old.<\/p>\n
Older, apparently, than fermentation.<\/p>\n
Older than the agricultural revolution that was once thought to be the precondition for regular intoxicant use.<\/p>\n
The study authors note that human drug use is probably older than the Sulawesi evidence.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The oldest direct physical evidence and the actual origin of the behavior are two different things.<\/p>\n
Whatever the Sulawesi forager learned from \u2014 whether they learned it from other people, discovered it independently, or inherited it from a tradition that stretched back further \u2014 those prior instances would have left no trace in the archaeological record.<\/p>\n
The Old Assumption: Drugs And Agriculture<\/p>\n
For most of the twentieth century, a specific narrative about the origins of human drug use dominated scientific and popular thinking: people began using mind-altering substances when they became farmers, because farming created the surplus and the settled conditions in which fermentation, cultivation of psychoactive plants, and other drug-producing activities became practical.<\/p>\n
This narrative had a certain logic to it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Before farming, the argument went, hunter-gatherers were too busy surviving to engage in the cultivation or elaborate processing of psychoactive plants.<\/p>\n
The cognitive overhead and resource requirements of drug production required the surplus that only agriculture could provide.<\/p>\n
The evidence has been accumulating for decades that this narrative is wrong.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Ancient cannabis use has been documented in several contexts that predate its cultivation as a crop.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This appears to have happened in multiple independent locations, with multiple different plants, across the full range of the modern human dispersal.<\/p>\n
The impulse to alter consciousness \u2014 or to use plants for their pain-relieving, stimulant, or euphoria-producing effects \u2014 is not a byproduct of agriculture.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is, apparently, very deeply human.<\/p>\n
The Addiction Question And Its Archaeological Implications<\/p>\n
The study makes a careful argument about addiction, and it is worth examining because it represents a significant contribution to how we understand the deep prehistory of this phenomenon.<\/p>\n
Modern clinical definitions of addiction \u2014 formalized in diagnostic manuals like the DSM-5 \u2014 emphasize several features: continued use despite knowledge of harm, craving, loss of control, tolerance (needing more substance to achieve the same effect), and withdrawal symptoms.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi foragers could not tell us whether they experienced craving, withdrawal, or loss of control.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Their inner life is completely inaccessible to archaeology.<\/p>\n
What the dental evidence shows is the behavioral and physical signature of continued use despite harm: the teeth were being destroyed by the habit, and the habit continued.<\/p>\n
The exposure of the pulp in CPL-R2a’s most severely damaged teeth meant that the pain produced by the habit created a specific form of pharmacological trap: the substance that caused the pain also provided temporary relief from it, making cessation of the behavior directly painful in the short term.<\/p>\n
This is a situation that modern clinical researchers would recognize immediately as one of the structural features of addiction \u2014 the way in which a substance becomes self-reinforcing through the harm it causes, as much as through the pleasure it produces.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The relief of withdrawal symptoms is one of the most powerful drivers of continued substance use in modern addictions.<\/p>\n
The analgesic effect of arecoline on the tooth pain the habit itself had produced may have been the prehistoric equivalent.<\/p>\n
The study is careful to acknowledge the limits of this interpretation.<\/p>\n
The archaeological evidence does not prove addiction in the clinical sense.<\/p>\n
It demonstrates persistent behavior despite physical harm, and it identifies a pharmacological mechanism by which that persistence could be reinforced.<\/p>\n
Whether the foragers themselves would have recognized or described their behavior in terms that map onto modern addiction concepts is unknowable.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What the study does establish is that the pharmacological dynamics of substance use and potential addiction are not inventions of modernity.<\/p>\n
The same molecular mechanisms \u2014 arecoline acting at muscarinic receptors, producing stimulant effects, providing analgesia that might reinforce use \u2014 were present and operating on Ice Age humans in the same ways they operate on modern users.<\/p>\n
The Pharmacological Experiments: Frog Egg Cells And Human Receptors<\/p>\n
One of the most technically distinctive aspects of the study is the pharmacological work conducted by Roger Papke’s group, which provided the experimental evidence that intact areca nuts can release physiologically active arecoline during sucking.<\/p>\n
This question \u2014 can you get the drug by sucking the whole nut, or do you need to process it? \u2014 is central to the interpretation of the ancient dental wear.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If the answer were no, the hypothesis that the ancient foragers were deliberately seeking arecoline’s effects would be much harder to sustain.<\/p>\n
They might have been holding the nuts in their mouths for reasons unrelated to the psychoactive effect \u2014 as a food source, as something to work between the teeth out of habit, or for some other reason.<\/p>\n
If the answer is yes \u2014 if simply sucking the nut releases physiologically significant amounts of arecoline \u2014 then the hypothesis that the foragers were seeking the drug’s effects becomes much more plausible.<\/p>\n
The experimental approach: intact areca nuts were soaked in artificial saliva (which mimics the chemical environment of the mouth without involving human subjects) for periods consistent with the sustained nut-sucking that the dental wear implies.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The resulting “broth” was then applied to frog egg cells (Xenopus oocytes) that had been genetically engineered to express human muscarinic acetylcholine receptors on their surface.<\/p>\n
These cells function as biosensors for receptor activation: when a compound activates the receptors, the cells produce a measurable electrical signal.<\/p>\n
The result: the arecoline released by intact areca nuts soaked in artificial saliva was sufficient to activate the human muscarinic receptors.<\/p>\n
The dose was lower than what modern betel quid use produces \u2014 processing with lime significantly increases arecoline extraction \u2014 but it was pharmacologically active.<\/p>\n
This experimental confirmation is what distinguishes the Sulawesi study from a purely correlational archaeological finding.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The researchers didn’t just find chemical traces of arecoline and unusual dental wear.<\/p>\n
They also tested whether the behavior implied by that wear could actually produce the drug effect.<\/p>\n
It can.<\/p>\n
The use of frog egg cells expressing human receptors is a standard, well-validated approach in pharmacology for testing how compounds interact with human neurochemistry.<\/p>\n
The fact that this approach was applied in an archaeological study is itself notable \u2014 it illustrates the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of modern archaeochemistry, in which researchers bring pharmaceutical and biochemical methods to bear on questions about ancient human behavior.<\/p>\n
Betel Nut Today: The Modern Context<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi findings invite a comparison with the current global situation of betel nut use, because the ancient and modern are connected in ways that the study makes explicit.<\/p>\n
Betel nut is the world’s fourth most widely used psychoactive substance.<\/p>\n
Approximately 600 to 700 million people use it regularly \u2014 that is, at least once a week.<\/p>\n
The majority of these users are in Asia: Taiwan, India, Bangladesh, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and many other countries and territories.<\/p>\n
In many of these contexts, betel nut use is deeply culturally embedded.<\/p>\n
In parts of India and Taiwan, offering and accepting betel nut is a social ritual that marks hospitality, affection, and welcome.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In Papua New Guinea, betel nut is as routine as a morning cup of coffee in other cultures.<\/p>\n
In parts of Southeast Asia, betel nut chewing is practiced by a majority of the adult population in rural areas.<\/p>\n
The public health dimension of this prevalence is severe.<\/p>\n
Oral cancer rates in countries with high betel nut use are dramatically elevated.<\/p>\n
Taiwan, for example, has one of the highest rates of oral cancer in the world, and the association with betel nut use is well-established.<\/p>\n
India faces a similar burden.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The combination of the addictive properties of arecoline, the cultural normalization of use, and the severe health consequences creates a public health challenge in these countries that is comparable, in some respects, to the tobacco crisis in Western countries in the twentieth century.<\/p>\n
The ancient Sulawesi evidence is relevant to this modern public health context in a way that the researchers acknowledge: understanding the deep history of a behavior, including its origins and its pharmacological mechanisms, can inform efforts to address its modern consequences.<\/p>\n
If betel nut use was habitual and potentially addictive among Ice Age foragers \u2014 if the pharmacological trap that drives continued use despite tooth destruction operated on Pleistocene brains as it operates on modern ones \u2014 that understanding can inform how health systems and communities approach the challenge of changing deeply ingrained behaviors.<\/p>\n
The study’s finding that the ancient form of use (sucking whole nuts) was different from the modern form (chewing processed quids with lime) may also have implications for harm-reduction approaches.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The ancient practice, while damaging in its own ways, did not involve the lime that appears to be a significant co-carcinogen in the modern quid.<\/p>\n
Whether returning to simpler forms of use could reduce some of the cancer risk while maintaining some of the cultural and social functions of the practice is a question for public health researchers, not archaeologists.<\/p>\n
But the historical baseline provided by the Sulawesi findings gives that research a new context.<\/p>\n
What Was The Initial Reason?<\/p>\n
The study is honest about one thing it cannot answer: why did the Sulawesi foragers start using betel nut in the first place?<\/p>\n
The evidence documents sustained, habitual use.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It documents the pharmacological mechanism by which the habit was maintained and potentially reinforced through the pain-relief cycle.<\/p>\n
It does not document the initial impetus.<\/p>\n
Multiple possibilities have been discussed by researchers commenting on the study:<\/p>\n
Pain relief for pre-existing toothaches.<\/p>\n
Arecoline has analgesic properties \u2014 it numbs pain.<\/p>\n
A forager with a painful tooth might have discovered, intentionally or by accident, that holding an areca nut against the sore tooth provided temporary relief.<\/p>\n
If the nut was already known as a food item or a useful object, trying it against a toothache would have been a natural experiment.<\/p>\n
Stimulant effects for hunting and foraging.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The alertness-producing and fatigue-suppressing effects of arecoline would have been genuinely useful for people engaged in physically demanding activities that required sustained attention and energy.<\/p>\n
A hunter or gatherer who discovered that certain nuts made them feel more energetic and alert would have reason to continue using them.<\/p>\n
Social transmission.<\/p>\n
The most parsimonious explanation is that the behavior was learned by observing others.<\/p>\n
If some members of the forager’s group were already using betel nuts, the individual would have learned the behavior socially.<\/p>\n
The question of why the group first adopted it still applies, but the spread of the habit within a group might be purely social.<\/p>\n
Ritual or ceremonial context.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Various analysts have suggested that the early use of psychoactive plants may have been primarily ceremonial \u2014 that the altered states produced by mind-altering substances had spiritual or ritual significance that drove their adoption before their everyday use became established.<\/p>\n
This hypothesis cannot be evaluated from the dental and chemical evidence alone.<\/p>\n
Nutritional experimentation.<\/p>\n
Foragers are constantly experimenting with the landscape’s edible and useful materials.<\/p>\n
An areca nut might have been tried as a potential food source, found to be unpalatable as food but producing interesting effects, and adopted for those effects.<\/p>\n
The reality is probably some combination of these \u2014 different individuals may have been introduced to the behavior in different ways, and the sustained use that the dental evidence documents reflects whatever combination of motivations was sufficient to maintain the habit despite its cost to the teeth.<\/p>\n
Brumm himself has been careful not to overspecify: “The evidence does not indicate precisely the reasons for first starting betel nut use \u2014 whether it was relief, stimulation, ritual or some social norm,” as the Ancient-Origins account reports.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This honest uncertainty is appropriate for the evidence.<\/p>\n
The mechanisms of sustained use are documented.<\/p>\n
The reasons for initial adoption are not.<\/p>\n
The Ice Age World Of The Sulawesi Foragers<\/p>\n
The person who lived between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago in the karst country of South Sulawesi inhabited a very different world from the modern one \u2014 but not as different as the time gap might suggest.<\/p>\n
25,000 years ago falls within the Last Glacial Maximum \u2014 the coldest phase of the most recent Ice Age, when ice sheets covered much of northern Europe, northern North America, and the high-latitude zones of the Southern Hemisphere.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But Sulawesi is in the tropics, and the tropics were not frozen.<\/p>\n
The island’s climate during the Last Glacial Maximum was cooler and drier than today but remained essentially tropical \u2014 forested, warm, productive.<\/p>\n
The sea level was dramatically lower than today.<\/p>\n
At the Last Glacial Maximum, sea levels were roughly 120 to 130 meters below the current level.<\/p>\n
This means that the shallow continental shelves of Southeast Asia \u2014 the Sunda Shelf that connects the mainland of Southeast Asia to Sumatra, Java, and Borneo \u2014 were exposed land.<\/p>\n
But Sulawesi, as noted, was never connected to the mainland.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It remained an island, though a slightly larger one at glacial-maximum sea levels.<\/p>\n
The foragers of Ice Age Sulawesi lived in a landscape of karst limestone \u2014 the same landscape that forms the caves like Leang Bulu Bettue that have preserved their art and, now, their bones.<\/p>\n
The karst offered specific resources: shelter in the caves, freshwater from karst springs, and the rich biodiversity of tropical forests.<\/p>\n
The forests of Sulawesi, isolated on their island for millions of years, had developed distinctive endemic fauna \u2014 the babirusa (a pig-like animal with elaborate upward-curving tusks), the anoa (small forest buffalo), the Sulawesi warty pig whose image appears in the earliest cave paintings at the site.<\/p>\n
The foragers who used Leang Bulu Bettue had already been in Sulawesi for a very long time by the period of the betel nut evidence.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The cave paintings at the site and others in the Maros-Pangkep karst are tens of thousands of years old \u2014 people had been living in and around these caves since well before the Last Glacial Maximum.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
This depth of landscape knowledge is part of the context for the betel nut discovery.<\/p>\n
The foragers were not naive experimenters stumbling across an unfamiliar plant.<\/p>\n
They lived in an environment they had known, through accumulated cultural knowledge, for thousands of years.<\/p>\n
The areca palm would have been part of their landscape vocabulary \u2014 a known tree, with known fruits, whose seeds had properties that were known and sought.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Literature Before This Study: What Was Assumed<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi study makes its contribution to a specific literature \u2014 the archaeology of psychoactive plant use and its origins \u2014 and understanding the prior state of that literature helps appreciate the significance of the new finding.<\/p>\n
Before the Sulawesi paper, the conventional timeline for the earliest evidence of human drug use looked roughly like this:<\/p>\n
13,000 years ago: Beer brewing residues from Raqefet Cave, Israel.<\/p>\n
This was the oldest direct chemical evidence of a psychoactive substance produced intentionally by humans.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Around 10,000 to 12,000 years ago: The appearance of cannabis in early Chinese contexts, though the specific use as a psychoactive versus fiber or food is debated for the earliest periods.<\/p>\n
Around 5,700 years ago: Chemical evidence of mescaline in peyote associated with forager contexts in the American Southwest.<\/p>\n
Around 3,500 years ago: The earliest solid evidence of betel nut use, from Bronze Age contexts in Thailand.<\/p>\n
Each of these data points was surrounded by discussion of whether even older use was likely and simply not preserved in the archaeological record, or whether the specific dates reflected real thresholds in human behavior.<\/p>\n
The general view was that the archaeological record was biased toward underrepresentation \u2014 that drug use was probably older than the oldest evidence, but the evidence was hard to preserve and hard to detect.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi paper shifts the upper bound of the direct evidence significantly.<\/p>\n
The 16,000 to 25,000 year date for the betel nut specimen is not simply a few thousand years older than the previous record; it is twice to nearly twice as old.<\/p>\n
It extends the evidence into the Last Glacial Maximum, into a period that was previously thought to be too distant in time for this kind of behavioral evidence to have survived.<\/p>\n
The fact that it does survive \u2014 in the form of chemically detectable arecoline traces in dental tissue \u2014 reflects both the exceptional qualities of tooth enamel as a preservation medium and the specific favorable conditions of the Sulawesi cave deposits.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Significance For Understanding Human Cognition<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi finding is not just an archaeological curiosity about an obscure plant.<\/p>\n
It has implications for how we understand the cognitive and behavioral repertoire of anatomically modern humans during a period \u2014 the Late Pleistocene \u2014 that is crucial for understanding who we are.<\/p>\n
The period between roughly 40,000 and 12,000 years ago saw the dispersal of modern humans across most of the world, the development of the earliest representational art (in places including Sulawesi itself), the extinction of the Neanderthals and other archaic human groups, and the beginning of the behavioral patterns that would eventually lead to agriculture, cities, writing, and all the rest.<\/p>\n
Understanding what these ancient humans were doing \u2014 not just where they were and what tools they were making, but how they were organized socially, what they were thinking about, what they were consuming \u2014 is one of the central projects of modern archaeology and paleoanthropology.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi betel nut evidence adds a new data point to this picture.<\/p>\n
The forager who was habitually sucking areca nuts 16,000 to 25,000 years ago was demonstrating several things simultaneously:<\/p>\n
Knowledge of the plant’s properties.<\/p>\n
They knew that this specific seed, held in the mouth in this specific way, produced this specific effect.<\/p>\n
This knowledge had to be learned and transmitted culturally.<\/p>\n
The ability to pursue pleasure or relief even at cost.<\/p>\n
The sustained use of the nut despite the dental damage it caused reflects a cognitive sophistication: the ability to value a present benefit (the stimulant effect, the analgesia) despite a future cost (the dental destruction).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This is the same temporal discounting dynamic that characterizes human decision-making in modern contexts involving addictive substances.<\/p>\n
The capacity for habit and addiction.<\/p>\n
Whether or not the clinical definition of addiction applies, the sustained habitual use despite harm is a form of behavioral pattern that reflects specific cognitive and motivational dynamics.<\/p>\n
None of these inferences is surprising given what we know about Late Pleistocene modern humans.<\/p>\n
They were fully cognitively modern \u2014 capable of art, symbolic thought, and sophisticated tool-making.<\/p>\n
But each data point that fills in the picture of their daily life and behavioral repertoire contributes to a richer understanding of who they were.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What The Study Cannot Tell Us<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi study is careful in what it claims, and the things it cannot tell us are worth noting explicitly.<\/p>\n
It cannot tell us whether the betel nut use was ceremonial or secular.<\/p>\n
The use of psychoactive substances in ceremonial contexts is documented in many cultures, and some researchers have argued that altered states of consciousness played important roles in early religious and ritual practice.<\/p>\n
But the dental wear and chemical evidence alone cannot distinguish between use in a ceremonial context and use as an everyday habit.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It cannot tell us how widespread the practice was.<\/p>\n
Two individuals are a very small sample.<\/p>\n
Both happen to be from sites in South Sulawesi, and both show the same unusual dental wear \u2014 but whether this practice was limited to a small number of individuals in these communities, common in the broader forager population of Sulawesi, or part of a regional practice extending to other islands is not established.<\/p>\n
It cannot tell us how the practice was transmitted.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Whether the foragers learned from each other by observation, whether there were specific individuals who knew about the betel nut’s properties and taught others, whether the practice was transmitted from adult to child as part of cultural knowledge \u2014 all of this is invisible to archaeology.<\/p>\n
It cannot tell us what the experience was like for the individuals.<\/p>\n
What it felt like to have the stimulant effect, how it integrated into daily life, whether it was used at specific times or continuously \u2014 these are questions the physical evidence cannot answer.<\/p>\n
It cannot tell us whether the practice continued uninterrupted from 25,000 years ago to the modern use of betel quid in Sulawesi.<\/p>\n
There may have been continuity, there may have been interruptions and reinventions, there may have been multiple independent discoveries of the same plant’s properties.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The evidence documents the two data points, not the trajectory between them.<\/p>\n
The Cave And The Continuity<\/p>\n
There is something resonant about the fact that the evidence for 25,000-year-old betel nut use was found in a limestone cave in the Maros-Pangkep karst of South Sulawesi \u2014 the same karst system that has also yielded the world’s oldest cave paintings.<\/p>\n
The people who painted the pig and the hunting scene in the Maros-Pangkep caves were anatomically and behaviorally modern humans.<\/p>\n
They were capable of symbolic thought, of representing the world in images, of organizing complex behaviors and transmitting knowledge across generations.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The person whose teeth were found at Leang Bulu Bettue was the same kind of human.<\/p>\n
They lived in or near the same karst landscape.<\/p>\n
They may have known about, or lived alongside, the people who made the cave paintings.<\/p>\n
Their relationship with the areca palm was one element of a full human life that included all the cognitive and social complexity of modern humanity.<\/p>\n
The cave preserved both kinds of evidence.<\/p>\n
The art on the walls, visible and vivid after 45,000 years.<\/p>\n
The chemical traces in the teeth, invisible until chemical analysis revealed them, persisting for 25,000 years in the dental tissue of a jaw fragment and three molars.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Together, they form a picture of Late Pleistocene modern humans in Sulawesi who were painting caves and sucking psychoactive nuts \u2014 who were engaged, in other words, in the full range of behaviours that modern humans engage in: artistic expression, psychoactive substance use, hunting and gathering, social living, and all the rest.<\/p>\n
The depth of this human behavioral repertoire \u2014 reaching back well into the Ice Age, documented in fragments from a limestone cave on a tropical island \u2014 is what makes discoveries like the Sulawesi betel nut study so significant.<\/p>\n
We have been who we are for a very long time.<\/p>\n
The Record That Will Be Broken<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi study is explicit that it represents the earliest direct physical evidence for habitual drug use, not necessarily the actual origin of the practice.<\/p>\n
Physical evidence of ancient behavior depends on preservation.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Most organic materials do not preserve over tens of thousands of years under most conditions.<\/p>\n
The specific combination of dental tissue (which preserves very well) and arecoline chemical traces (which apparently survive in that dental tissue over geological timescales under the right conditions) is unusual.<\/p>\n
Before the Sulawesi discovery, no one had specifically looked for arecoline in ancient dental tissue from the Ice Age because no one had reason to think that betel nut use went back that far.<\/p>\n
The distinctive dental wear pattern was the clue that prompted the chemical analysis.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If similar wear patterns are present in other ancient specimens from Southeast Asia that have not yet been examined, those specimens might yield additional evidence of even older use.<\/p>\n
This is the pattern of archaeological discovery: a new detection method or a new interpretive framework opens up evidence that was always there but unrecognized.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi study has established both a detection method (look for arecoline in dental tissue where there is unusual wear) and an interpretive framework (this specific wear pattern may indicate betel nut sucking) that could be applied to other specimens.<\/p>\n
It is also worth noting that evidence of even older drug use might exist in forms that have nothing to do with betel nut.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Other plants with psychoactive properties \u2014 plants whose use might have left chemical traces in bones, teeth, or food residues at archaeological sites \u2014 have not all been systematically investigated for their deep prehistory.<\/p>\n
The field of archaeochemistry, which applies chemical analysis to archaeological specimens to detect the traces of ancient organic compounds, is still developing its full toolkit.<\/p>\n
The 25,000-year record for deliberate drug use will almost certainly be broken by future discoveries.<\/p>\n
What those discoveries will be, and where they will be found, is genuinely unknown.<\/p>\n
The Ending That Is Also A Beginning<\/p>\n
Three molars and a jaw fragment, found in a limestone cave in South Sulawesi.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Chemical traces of arecoline in the dental tissue.<\/p>\n
Rounded grooves worn deep into the enamel by years or decades of holding a hard seed in the mouth.<\/p>\n
This is what the oldest evidence for human drug use looks like.<\/p>\n
It does not look like a dramatic moment.<\/p>\n
It does not look like anything, really, without the analytical tools that turned the grooves and the chemical traces into a story.<\/p>\n
The story is: a person, living and foraging in the tropical karst of South Sulawesi between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago, had a habit.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They sucked areca nuts \u2014 the same seeds that roughly 600 to 700 million people use today in processed form across much of Asia and the Pacific.<\/p>\n
The habit wore into their teeth.<\/p>\n
The wear exposed the nerve.<\/p>\n
The pain drove continued use.<\/p>\n
The arecoline provided temporary relief from the pain it had caused.<\/p>\n
This is the oldest known cycle of human substance use and its physical consequences.<\/p>\n
It is not a glamorous story.<\/p>\n
It is a human story: a person dealing with pain, seeking relief, finding a substance that helped and hurt at once, and continuing to use it because the short-term help outweighed the long-term hurt in the moment of each decision.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The study that revealed this story was published in Science Advances on September 9, 2026.<\/p>\n
The journal is one of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s open-access publications.<\/p>\n
The study is available to read by anyone with an internet connection.<\/p>\n
The journal title of the paper: “Betel nut sucking is the earliest recorded evidence for the habitual use of a neuroactive plant drug.”<\/p>\n
Adam Brumm of Griffith University led the team.<\/p>\n
Fourteen authors contributed.<\/p>\n
The Indonesian archaeologists and researchers who have spent years excavating these Sulawesi caves made the discovery possible.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The teeth were found in a trench.<\/p>\n
The grooves were noticed.<\/p>\n
The question was asked.<\/p>\n
The analysis was done.<\/p>\n
The frog egg cells expressed the human receptors.<\/p>\n
The arecoline activated them.<\/p>\n
And an Ice Age forager’s habit \u2014 preserved by accident in dental tissue for 25,000 years \u2014 became the oldest known chapter in the history of human drug use.<\/p>\n
The cave had kept the secret.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The chemistry revealed it.<\/p>\n
And the history of what it means to be human got a little longer, and a little stranger, and a little more familiar.<\/p>\n
Because the story of the teeth from Sulawesi is, at its core, a story about wanting.<\/p>\n
About seeking.<\/p>\n
About finding a plant that does something to the body and the mind, and returning to it again and again, even when returning costs something.<\/p>\n
That story is as old as we are.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As old, at least, as 25,000 years ago.<\/p>\n
And probably older.<\/p>\n
The Toalean Context: Understanding The Younger Specimen<\/p>\n
The second individual \u2014 CPL-R2a \u2014 is associated with the Toalean technocomplex, and understanding what this means provides important cultural context for the betel nut use documented in the younger specimen.<\/p>\n
The Toalean is a distinctive foraging culture that has been identified at multiple sites in South Sulawesi, dated to roughly 8,000 to 1,500 years ago.<\/p>\n
It is named for the Toala people \u2014 an indigenous group of the Maros-Pangkep region \u2014 and it is characterized by specific stone tool types that are found nowhere else in the world.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Among the most distinctive Toalean tools are the Maros points \u2014 extraordinarily small, symmetrically worked stone projectile points that are among the most refined small stone tools from anywhere in the world.<\/p>\n
The Toalean people were hunter-gatherers operating in the karst landscape of South Sulawesi during the Holocene \u2014 the warm period after the Ice Age.<\/p>\n
They were contemporary with the development of agriculture in much of the rest of the world but did not themselves practice farming.<\/p>\n
Agriculture reached Sulawesi only relatively recently, meaning that the Toalean tradition represents a sustained forager adaptation in a tropical island environment.<\/p>\n
The association of CPL-R2a with the Toalean technocomplex is significant because it shows that betel nut use was not limited to the Ice Age period represented by Maros-LBB-1a.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The practice was continuing, in the same region, in a culturally distinct but geographically and temporally adjacent tradition.<\/p>\n
This continuity \u2014 across the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, across more than 10,000 years of time, in different cultural contexts \u2014 is one of the strongest arguments for the study’s central claim about habitual use.<\/p>\n
If the betel nut habit had been a one-off individual peculiarity, we would not expect to find the same distinctive dental pathology in two individuals from different sites and different time periods.<\/p>\n
The recurrence is evidence of a persistent cultural practice, transmitted across time and across the social and cultural changes that separate the Late Pleistocene foragers from the Toalean tradition.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Toalean Maros points found at sites throughout the region are a demonstration of sophisticated tool-making technology.<\/p>\n
The people who made them \u2014 including, presumably, CPL-R2a’s community \u2014 were skilled, cognitively sophisticated foragers.<\/p>\n
Their adoption and maintenance of a betel nut habit is entirely consistent with the cognitive capacities of modern humans.<\/p>\n
The Frog Cell Experiment In More Detail<\/p>\n
The pharmacological experiments conducted by Roger Papke’s laboratory deserve more detailed attention because they represent the experimental backbone of the study’s central claim about pharmacological activity.<\/p>\n
The Xenopus oocyte system \u2014 the frog egg cells expressing human receptors \u2014 is a standard and well-validated approach in pharmacological research.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Xenopus laevis frogs are used because their oocytes (unfertilized eggs) are large, robust cells that are easily injected with genetic material.<\/p>\n
When the RNA for a human receptor protein is injected into the cell, the cell machinery reads the RNA and produces the receptor protein on the cell surface.<\/p>\n
The muscarinic acetylcholine receptors that arecoline targets \u2014 specifically the M1, M2, and M3 subtypes \u2014 are well-characterized in the pharmacological literature.<\/p>\n
Their responses to arecoline and related compounds are known from decades of research on the pharmacology of betel nut.<\/p>\n
The Xenopus oocyte system allows those receptors to be expressed in isolation \u2014 without the complex background of a whole brain or a whole animal \u2014 so that the specific pharmacological activity of a test compound can be measured directly.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The experimental design for the Sulawesi study: areca nuts were soaked in artificial saliva for periods ranging from one minute to several hours, mimicking the conditions of sustained nut-sucking as implied by the dental wear pattern.<\/p>\n
The resulting solutions were then tested against the expressed human receptors.<\/p>\n
The response \u2014 measured as an electrical current produced by the receptor-expressing cells \u2014 was compared to control conditions.<\/p>\n
The result: detectable, dose-dependent activation of human muscarinic receptors by the arecoline released from intact nuts soaked in artificial saliva.<\/p>\n
The amount of arecoline released was lower than what the processed quid produces \u2014 soaking in saliva extracts less arecoline than chewing with lime \u2014 but it was pharmacologically significant.<\/p>\n
This result establishes that the ancient practice of sucking whole nuts was not merely cultural, nutritional, or habitual in the sense of being a mindless behavior.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It was pharmacologically active.<\/p>\n
The arecoline was getting into the body.<\/p>\n
It was acting on brain receptors.<\/p>\n
It was producing effects.<\/p>\n
The existence of this pharmacological activity is what makes the ancient dental wear pattern interpretable as drug use rather than simply as an unusual dietary habit or stress behavior.<\/p>\n
Combined with the chemical detection of arecoline in the dental tissue itself, the experimental demonstration closes the explanatory loop: the behavior produced the drug; the drug was in the teeth; the behavior continued despite the damage it caused.<\/p>\n
Why Dental Tissue Preserves Chemicals So Well<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The preservation of arecoline traces in 25,000-year-old dental tissue is not obvious, and understanding why teeth are such good chemical archives is important for appreciating the significance of the detection.<\/p>\n
Tooth enamel is the hardest biological material in the human body.<\/p>\n
It is primarily composed of hydroxyapatite \u2014 a calcium phosphate mineral \u2014 organized into a highly ordered crystalline structure.<\/p>\n
This mineral composition makes enamel extraordinarily resistant to degradation: it survives in the archaeological record far better than bone, which contains more organic material and degrades more readily.<\/p>\n
Within the enamel and the underlying dentine, organic compounds from the mouth can become incorporated during life.<\/p>\n
This incorporation happens through several mechanisms: direct diffusion of compounds from saliva into the mineral matrix, binding of organic molecules to the hydroxyapatite crystal surface, and incorporation of compounds that precipitate from solution within the tooth structure.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Compounds that bind to the mineral phase of the tooth \u2014 or that are incorporated within the crystalline structure \u2014 are protected from the degradation that would rapidly destroy them in a free, unprotected state.<\/p>\n
The mineral matrix acts as a sealed environment that limits the access of water, oxygen, and microorganisms that would otherwise break down the organic compounds.<\/p>\n
This is why dental calculus \u2014 the mineralized plaque that builds up on tooth surfaces \u2014 has become such an important source of ancient biomolecular evidence.<\/p>\n
Dental calculus preserves ancient proteins, ancient plant residues, ancient DNA from oral bacteria, and other organic materials across archaeological timescales.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi study’s detection of arecoline is in the same research tradition, applying the knowledge that teeth preserve organic chemical traces to a question about psychoactive plant use.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific preservation of arecoline in dental tissue over 25,000 years is remarkable but not inexplicable.<\/p>\n
The molecule’s incorporation into the mineral matrix of the tooth during habitual use, followed by the protection of that mineral matrix in the favorable preservation conditions of the South Sulawesi cave, is a plausible pathway for long-term survival.<\/p>\n
The Previous Bronze Age Betel Record And Why It Fell So Far Behind<\/p>\n
Before the Sulawesi study, the earliest solid chemical evidence for betel nut use came from Bronze Age contexts in Thailand, dated to roughly 3,000 to 3,500 years ago.<\/p>\n
The study by the Sulawesi team pushes this back by more than 20,000 years, which raises an obvious question: why was the evidence for earlier use not found before?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Several factors explain the gap.<\/p>\n
First, the expectation was wrong.<\/p>\n
The working assumption in the field was that betel nut use was an agricultural period practice \u2014 associated with the spread of farming and the cultivation of the areca palm as a crop.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Second, the detection method was not obvious.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The distinctive dental wear pattern that led the Sulawesi team to investigate the ancient teeth for arecoline had not been formally documented or recognized as a diagnostic marker.<\/p>\n
Without knowing that this specific wear pattern indicates betel nut sucking, there was no reason to look for arecoline in other ancient specimens that might show it.<\/p>\n
Third, good specimens are rare.<\/p>\n
Human skeletal remains from the Pleistocene of Southeast Asia are uncommon.<\/p>\n
The tropical climate, which accelerates organic decomposition, means that ancient bones and teeth are less well preserved in Southeast Asia than in more arid or cold environments.<\/p>\n
The survival of Maros-LBB-1a’s jaw fragment and three molars from the Pleistocene deposits at Leang Bulu Bettue is itself unusual \u2014 the 2025 publication describing the specimen notes that it is the only human skeletal element ever found in the Pleistocene of Sulawesi.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Fourth, the research focus was elsewhere.<\/p>\n
The archaeology of prehistoric drug use has been a growing field but one that has focused primarily on better-documented substances in better-preserved contexts \u2014 cannabis in Central Asian tombs, mescaline in American Southwest cave contexts, beer residues in Near Eastern sites.<\/p>\n
The betel nut did not seem like a candidate for Pleistocene investigation.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi study changes all of this.<\/p>\n
The diagnostic wear pattern is now formally documented, the chemical detection method has been validated, and the expectation that drug use was limited to the agricultural period has been refuted.<\/p>\n
The Island Biology Of Sulawesi And Its Consequences<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Sulawesi is one of the most biologically distinctive islands in the world.<\/p>\n
Its long isolation as an island \u2014 it has never been connected to the Asian or Australian continental shelves \u2014 has produced a fauna and flora with high rates of endemism: species found nowhere else on Earth.<\/p>\n
The babirusa \u2014 the strange deer-pig whose males grow tusks that curve back and nearly pierce their own skulls \u2014 is endemic to Sulawesi.<\/p>\n
The anoa \u2014 two species of small buffalo that evolved on the island \u2014 is endemic.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi warty pig, depicted in what may be the world’s oldest cave painting, is endemic.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Dozens of bird species are found only on Sulawesi.<\/p>\n
The plant life shows similar patterns.<\/p>\n
The karst landscape of South Sulawesi, with its complex of caves, sinkholes, and tower karst formations, supports a distinct assemblage of plants adapted to the calcareous substrate and the mosaic of forest types that the karst topography creates.<\/p>\n
The areca palms of Sulawesi \u2014 the specific wild or semi-wild plants whose nuts the ancient foragers were using \u2014 were part of this endemic plant community.<\/p>\n
Areca palm species found in Sulawesi are related to but distinct from the species found on other islands and on the mainland.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific arecoline content, the specific nut size, and the specific growth habits of Sulawesi areca palms may differ somewhat from those found elsewhere.<\/p>\n
This matters for understanding the ancient betel nut use: the foragers were using plants that were native to their specific landscape, plants whose properties they had learned through intimate and long-standing familiarity with the island’s ecology.<\/p>\n
The areca palms were not imports; they were part of the forest that had been the context for human life on Sulawesi for tens of thousands of years.<\/p>\n
The Significance For Addiction Research<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Modern addiction research is concerned with understanding the deep drivers of substance use disorders \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
One of the central questions in addiction research is the extent to which addiction is a “disease of civilization” \u2014 a product of the specific stresses, social disconnections, and supply conditions of modern urban life \u2014 versus a biological phenomenon rooted in very basic features of human and mammalian neurophysiology.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi evidence speaks to this question by demonstrating that the pharmacological dynamics of addiction \u2014 the reinforcement of use through pain relief, the persistence of habitual use despite physical harm \u2014 were operating on human beings in a pre-agricultural, small-scale forager context.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Whatever the social context of the ancient use was, the biological dynamics that drove its continuation were the same dynamics that drive continuation in modern users.<\/p>\n
This does not settle the debate about whether addiction is primarily biological or primarily social \u2014 the social context clearly shapes every aspect of who uses what substance, in what amounts, with what consequences.<\/p>\n
But it does establish that the biological substrate of addiction is genuinely ancient, not a recent development produced by the specific conditions of modern life.<\/p>\n
The study also contributes to the evidence base for understanding betel nut addiction specifically.<\/p>\n
Betel nut addiction is a significant public health problem in the countries where it is prevalent, and treatment approaches for it are less developed than for better-studied substances like tobacco and alcohol.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Understanding that the addiction dynamic operates through the pain-reinforcement cycle that the ancient dental evidence suggests may have implications for treatment approaches that specifically target the pain-relief component of habitual use.<\/p>\n
The Science Of Ancient Dental Pathology<\/p>\n
The dental wear documented in the Sulawesi specimens is described by the study as a previously unrecognized form of pathology.<\/p>\n
This claim deserves examination because it has methodological implications beyond the specific betel nut finding.<\/p>\n
Bioarchaeology \u2014 the study of human skeletal remains in their archaeological context \u2014 has documented many forms of dental pathology that reflect specific behaviors or conditions.<\/p>\n
Caries (tooth decay) reflects dietary carbohydrate consumption.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Enamel hypoplasias reflect periods of growth stress during childhood.<\/p>\n
Chipping and fracturing reflects eating hard foods or using teeth as tools.<\/p>\n
Periodontal disease reflects gum health and oral hygiene practices.<\/p>\n
The specific wear pattern documented in the Sulawesi specimens \u2014 smooth, rounded, hollowed-out grooves at the contact points between held objects and enamel \u2014 had not been formally documented in the bioarchaeological literature before this study.<\/p>\n
As the study notes, this does not mean that the pattern has never existed in other specimens; it means it had not been recognized and described as a distinct pathology.<\/p>\n
The formal description of this pathology in the Sulawesi study creates a new diagnostic category that can now be applied retrospectively to other collections.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Bioarchaeologists examining ancient skeletal collections for this specific pattern might find additional examples that have been previously misidentified or overlooked.<\/p>\n
If similar wear patterns are found in specimens from other sites in Southeast Asia, the picture of ancient betel nut use would become substantially broader.<\/p>\n
This is one of the ways in which the Sulawesi study’s impact extends beyond the specific findings: by formally establishing and describing a diagnostic marker, it enables searches for that marker in other contexts that might reveal a wider distribution of the practice.<\/p>\n
What The Archaeologists Weren’t Looking For<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
One of the most instructive aspects of the Sulawesi discovery is that it came about partly by accident \u2014 or rather, by scientific curiosity in the face of an unexpected observation.<\/p>\n
The excavations at Leang Bulu Bettue and Leang Cappalombo 1 were not primarily focused on finding evidence of ancient drug use.<\/p>\n
They were investigating the prehistoric occupation of South Sulawesi caves more broadly \u2014 the timing of human arrival, the technologies used, the subsistence strategies, the art.<\/p>\n
The jaw fragment and three molars of Maros-LBB-1a were found as part of this broader investigation.<\/p>\n
When Brumm first examined them, the unusual dental wear was not immediately explicable.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The scientific response to an unexplained observation \u2014 asking what could cause this, proposing hypotheses, testing those hypotheses \u2014 is exactly how the discovery unfolded.<\/p>\n
The hypothesis that the wear was caused by holding round objects in the mouth led to the identification of betel nuts as the most plausible candidate.<\/p>\n
The decision to test this hypothesis chemically \u2014 looking for arecoline in the dental tissue \u2014 required both the hypothesis and the analytical capacity to test it.<\/p>\n
The experimental pharmacology confirmed that the behavior could have produced the drug effect.<\/p>\n
This process \u2014 from unexplained observation to tested hypothesis to confirmed conclusion \u2014 is a model for how scientific discovery works in archaeological chemistry.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It required the integration of dental pathology expertise (Vlok), analytical chemistry (Matheson), and pharmacology (Papke) with the archaeological expertise of Brumm and the Indonesian team.<\/p>\n
No single specialist could have made this discovery alone.<\/p>\n
The finding is also a reminder that the most important discoveries often come from looking carefully at things that are already in hand.<\/p>\n
The jaw fragment and molars had presumably been in the collection for some time before the distinctive wear pattern was recognized as the key to this story.<\/p>\n
The evidence was there; the interpretive framework that made it meaningful was still being assembled.<\/p>\n
The Deep Human Relationship With Plants<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi study is one data point in a much longer story about the relationship between humans and plants \u2014 a relationship that is fundamental to human biology, human culture, and human survival in ways that are easy to underestimate.<\/p>\n
Humans have been in intimate relationship with plants for the entirety of their evolutionary history.<\/p>\n
Plants are the foundation of most food chains, the sources of most medicines, the raw materials of most technologies, and \u2014 as the Sulawesi evidence demonstrates \u2014 the sources of the psychoactive substances that humans have used throughout their history to alter consciousness, relieve pain, and seek pleasure.<\/p>\n
The specific plants that humans have used for psychoactive purposes are numerous and geographically diverse: the areca palm in Southeast Asia, the tobacco plant in the Americas, the coca plant in South America, the coffee and tea plants in Africa and Asia, the opium poppy in Eurasia, the cannabis plant across much of the world, the peyote cactus in North America.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The diversity of these plants, and the independent discovery of their psychoactive properties in multiple different cultures across multiple different continents, is evidence of the depth and universality of human interest in plant-based psychoactive effects.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi evidence adds a specific data point to this broader story: the betel nut habit that began at least 25,000 years ago in the karst caves of South Sulawesi is now the oldest known example of intentional, habitual use of any psychoactive plant.<\/p>\n
It extends the human-plant relationship in this specific domain back into the Ice Age.<\/p>\n
The relationship continues.<\/p>\n
The 600 to 700 million people who use betel nut today are, in a pharmacological and behavioral sense, engaged in a practice that is 25,000 years old.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific form has changed \u2014 the quid with lime and betel vine leaf is different from the whole-nut sucking of the Pleistocene foragers.<\/p>\n
But the essential relationship between Homo sapiens and Areca catechu \u2014 the chemical conversation between human brain receptors and plant-produced alkaloids \u2014 is ancient.<\/p>\n
The Paper’s Title And What It Claims<\/p>\n
The title of the study published in Science Advances is worth reading carefully: “Betel nut sucking is the earliest recorded evidence for the habitual use of a neuroactive plant drug.”<\/p>\n
Every word in this title is chosen carefully:<\/p>\n
“Betel nut sucking” \u2014 not chewing, not processing, sucking.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The specific behavior implied by the dental wear pattern.<\/p>\n
“Earliest recorded” \u2014 the oldest in the direct physical record, not necessarily the actual oldest.<\/p>\n
The word “recorded” is an important qualifier.<\/p>\n
“Evidence” \u2014 the claim is about what the evidence shows, not about certainty.<\/p>\n
“Habitual” \u2014 not casual or occasional, but sustained and repeated.<\/p>\n
“Neuroactive” \u2014 not merely psychoactive but specifically acting on the nervous system, with a specific pharmacological mechanism.<\/p>\n
“Plant drug” \u2014 not a fermented beverage, not a processed compound, but a plant whose natural chemical composition produces effects when the plant itself is consumed.<\/p>\n
The precision of the title reflects the care of the underlying science.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The study is not claiming to have found evidence that humans have been getting high for 25,000 years in the casual, hyperbolic sense that some news coverage might suggest.<\/p>\n
It is claiming to have found the earliest direct physical evidence of sustained, habitual use of a plant compound that acts on the nervous system.<\/p>\n
That is a precise, testable, well-supported claim.<\/p>\n
It is also a genuinely remarkable one.<\/p>\n
The Conversation The Findings Open<\/p>\n
Beyond the specific finding, the Sulawesi study opens a broader conversation about how and why humans use psychoactive substances \u2014 a conversation that has philosophical, social, and public health dimensions.<\/p>\n
Why do humans seek altered states of consciousness?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The psychedelic researcher and philosopher Terence McKenna proposed the “stoned ape” hypothesis \u2014 that psychedelic plant use was a driver of the cognitive evolution that produced modern human intelligence.<\/p>\n
This specific hypothesis is not generally accepted in the scientific mainstream, but the broader question of whether and how psychoactive plant use has shaped human cognitive and cultural evolution is a legitimate area of inquiry.<\/p>\n
What does the antiquity of drug use mean for how we think about it?<\/p>\n
If humans have been using psychoactive plants for at least 25,000 years \u2014 and probably longer \u2014 does that inform how we think about the social and legal regulation of drug use today?<\/p>\n
The argument that drug use is a modern pathology \u2014 a consequence of social breakdown, of modernity’s discontents \u2014 is harder to sustain against evidence that it predates civilization by orders of magnitude.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
How do we understand the relationship between pain relief and psychoactive use?<\/p>\n
The pain-reinforcement cycle documented in CPL-R2a’s teeth is a specific instance of a much broader phenomenon: the use of psychoactive substances to manage pain.<\/p>\n
The modern opioid crisis in the United States is, in some respects, a contemporary version of the same dynamic \u2014 substances used for pain relief becoming the source of addiction and harm.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi evidence is a reminder that this pattern is not new.<\/p>\n
These conversations are bigger than any single study can resolve.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
But the Sulawesi study provides an empirical foundation for them that is richer and older than the evidence that existed before September 9, 2026.<\/p>\n
Looking Forward: What Comes Next<\/p>\n
The study published in Science Advances represents the beginning of a research program as much as the conclusion of one.<\/p>\n
The questions it raises will drive future work in several directions.<\/p>\n
First, the search for the diagnostic dental wear pattern in other ancient specimen collections.<\/p>\n
Now that the pattern has been formally described and associated with betel nut use, it can be systematically searched for in skeletal collections from across Southeast Asia and the Pacific.<\/p>\n
If it is found in other specimens, the geographic and temporal distribution of the ancient practice can be mapped more completely.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Second, the development of more sensitive chemical detection methods for arecoline and related compounds in ancient dental tissue.<\/p>\n
The detection in the Sulawesi specimens was achieved with existing methods; improvements in analytical sensitivity might allow detection in specimens where the chemical signal is weaker or less well-preserved.<\/p>\n
Third, the investigation of other pre-agricultural forager sites in Southeast Asia and the Pacific for evidence of betel nut use or other psychoactive plant use.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi evidence is suggestive of broader regional patterns that are not yet documented.<\/p>\n
Fourth, the examination of other ancient dental collections from other parts of the world for comparable diagnostic markers of sustained psychoactive plant use.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The betel nut wear pattern is specific to betel nut use, but other plants used by sustained sucking or chewing might produce their own diagnostic wear patterns that have not yet been identified.<\/p>\n
Fifth, the re-examination of assumptions about the timeline of human drug use in the light of the Sulawesi evidence.<\/p>\n
The working assumptions of the field need updating, and that updating will shape which questions are asked and which specimens are investigated in the coming years.<\/p>\n
The teeth from Leang Bulu Bettue have opened a door.<\/p>\n
What lies beyond it \u2014 how much further back the human relationship with psychoactive plants extends, how widespread it was among prehistoric populations, what it meant for human cognitive and cultural evolution \u2014 will take years of further research to address.<\/p>\n
The End Of The Beginning<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Three teeth.<\/p>\n
A jaw fragment.<\/p>\n
Twenty-five thousand years.<\/p>\n
A psychoactive alkaloid preserved in mineral-hard dental tissue.<\/p>\n
Frog egg cells expressing human brain receptors.<\/p>\n
A pattern of wear that had never been formally described before this paper.<\/p>\n
These are the elements of the oldest direct physical evidence for habitual human drug use.<\/p>\n
The Science Advances paper published on September 9, 2026, describes a discovery that will be cited in the literature of archaeology, pharmacology, and addiction science for decades.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It establishes a new baseline for the deep prehistory of human psychoactive plant use.<\/p>\n
It provides a framework \u2014 both methodological and conceptual \u2014 for the research that will build on it.<\/p>\n
And at its center, beneath all the analytical chemistry and the pharmacological experiments and the careful clinical language, is a very human story.<\/p>\n
Someone found a plant.<\/p>\n
They put it in their mouth.<\/p>\n
It did something.<\/p>\n
They kept doing it.<\/p>\n
The habit wore into their teeth \u2014 literally, physically, measurably \u2014 and the chemical traces of the plant stayed in the dental tissue for 25,000 years, waiting for someone to look.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The someone who looked was Adam Brumm and a team of researchers spread across two countries.<\/p>\n
The tools they used were mass spectrometers and frog egg cells and statistical models.<\/p>\n
The discovery they made was both ancient and immediate: that the person who died in a South Sulawesi cave between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago was doing something that 600 million people are still doing today.<\/p>\n
They were human, in the most recognizable way.<\/p>\n
They wanted what the plant gave them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
And they kept going back for it.<\/p>\n
The oldest known chapter in the history of human drug use ends here \u2014 or rather, begins here.<\/p>\n
Because what happened before that jaw was sealed in the limestone of Leang Bulu Bettue is a question that the evidence cannot answer.<\/p>\n
The record stands at 25,000 years.<\/p>\n
Until the next discovery breaks it.<\/p>\n
The Name “Betel Nut” And Its Misleading Taxonomy<\/p>\n
One of the persistent confusions about this topic \u2014 one that even well-informed readers sometimes carry \u2014 is the name “betel nut” itself, which is a misnomer that obscures what is actually involved.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The “nut” in “betel nut” is actually the seed of the areca palm (Areca catechu).<\/p>\n
The palm produces a fruit similar in general appearance to a small palm fruit, within which is the hard, fibrous seed.<\/p>\n
The seed is what is used; the fruit flesh is not.<\/p>\n
In botanical terms, the seed is not a nut at all.<\/p>\n
The “betel” in “betel nut” refers not to the palm but to the betel vine (Piper betle), a completely different plant.<\/p>\n
The betel vine’s leaves are what the nut is traditionally wrapped in when making the betel quid.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century, encountering the quid preparation in South and Southeast Asia, coined the term “betel” for the leaf, and the name stuck to the practice and, eventually, to the nut as well.<\/p>\n
So the phrase “betel nut” is, technically, a double misnomer: the “betel” comes from the leaf wrapping (not the nut itself), and the “nut” is actually a seed (not a botanical nut).<\/p>\n
The more precise term used in the scientific literature is “areca nut” or “areca seed.”<\/p>\n
Why does this matter for the Sulawesi discovery?<\/p>\n
It matters because the ancient foragers were using only the areca seed \u2014 the hard, round seed of the areca palm.<\/p>\n
They were not using the betel vine leaf, and they were not using the slaked lime.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
They were not making anything that could be called a “betel quid” in the traditional sense.<\/p>\n
What they were doing was sucking on areca seeds.<\/p>\n
The Sulawesi study is therefore, more precisely, about the oldest known use of areca nuts (areca seeds).<\/p>\n
The connection to the modern “betel nut” practice is real but partial: both involve the areca seed and its arecoline content, but the modern practice adds components that were absent in the ancient one.<\/p>\n
This distinction is important for public health communication as much as for archaeological accuracy.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
If harm-reduction research is going to build on the ancient baseline provided by the Sulawesi evidence, it needs to be clear about which components of the modern practice were present in the ancient one and which were not.<\/p>\n
The lime, in particular, is suspected of being a co-carcinogen in the development of oral cancer in modern users.<\/p>\n
The ancient foragers, who were not using lime, may have had a different cancer risk profile from modern betel quid users \u2014 though the extent of this difference is not established.<\/p>\n
The Forty-Five Thousand Year Cave Paintings And The Twenty-Five Thousand Year Teeth<\/p>\n
Leang Bulu Bettue is in the Maros-Pangkep karst \u2014 the same geological formation and roughly the same geographic area as the caves containing the world’s oldest representational art.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
In 2019, researchers reported a cave painting at Leang Tedongnge \u2014 also in the Maros-Pangkep karst \u2014 dated to at least 45,500 years ago.<\/p>\n
The painting depicts a warty pig (Sus celebensis), the endemic Sulawesi warty pig species, rendered in red ochre.<\/p>\n
This was subsequently identified as among the oldest known figurative art on Earth.<\/p>\n
The same research group has continued to find ancient art in the Maros-Pangkep caves.<\/p>\n
A 2021 publication reported a hunting scene at Leang Karampuang that may be even older \u2014 potentially dated to at least 51,200 years ago \u2014 though the dating of this finding remains the subject of scholarly discussion.<\/p>\n
The people who painted these caves were anatomically modern humans \u2014 Homo sapiens \u2014 who had arrived in Sulawesi from the African homeland at least 60,000 to 70,000 years ago or more.<\/p>\n
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Their artistic activity in the Maros-Pangkep caves demonstrates fully modern symbolic and representational thinking.<\/p>\n
The person whose jaw fragment was found at Leang Bulu Bettue \u2014 dated to 16,000 to 25,000 years ago \u2014 was part of this same long tradition of modern human occupation of the Sulawesi karst.<\/p>\n
They may have lived thousands of years after the oldest cave paintings, but they were in the same landscape, in the same caves, as the humans who created that art.<\/p>\n
The betel nut habit documented in their teeth is, in a sense, a complement to the cave paintings: both are evidence of specifically human behaviors in this specific place and time.<\/p>\n
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The art demonstrates symbolic and aesthetic capacity.<\/p>\n