Earliest Human Drug Use Ever Found Shows People in Indonesia Were Getting High on Betel Nut as Far Back as 25,000 Years Ago
Archaeologists have discovered evidence of betel nut use in human fossils from Indonesia dating back 25,000 years. This finding suggests that humans have been using psychoactive substances for ritual or recreational purposes much earlier than previously documented.
Why it matters
Provides new insights into the history of human behavior, culture, and the long-standing relationship between humans and psychoactive plants.
There is no fossil left over from the first person who got high. Somewhere deep in prehistory, a human or an earlier ancestor must have discovered that eating, chewing or drinking the right plant could make pain recede, sharpen the senses, or give you a good buzz. It likely happened accidentally at first. What happened next — whether people returned to the substance, shared it, or built rituals around it — has largely vanished with them.
Sometimes, thinking about these things has given us some extravagant ideas. I mean, really out there. The writer and psychedelic advocate Terence McKenna famously proposed his “stoned ape” hypothesis , arguing that encounters with psilocybin mushrooms helped propel the evolution of human perception, language and culture.
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