What may be the earliest known evidence for human drug use has been traced to ancient Indonesian foragers who sucked on mind-altering nuts as long as 25,000 years ago. Analysis of two exceptionally rare skeletons from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi revealed dramatic tooth wear and traces of a psychoactive substance in the individuals’ remaining teeth, suggesting they routinely sucked on hard, abrasive betel nuts.
Context
Although little known in western societies, betel nuts are the world’s fourth most widely used psychoactive substance after alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine, with an estimated tenth of the global population chewing the seeds. Prof. Adam Brumm at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution in Brisbane stated, “We’ve found evidence for how this very common drug use habit, which is found throughout a lot of the Asia-Pacific region today, might have evolved.”
The research began when the team examined skeletal remains of two pre-agricultural foragers unearthed at two different sites on the island. One skeleton was dated to about 7,000 years old, while the other was more ancient, dating between 16,000 to 25,000 years old.
Developments
The researchers describe in their paper published in Science Advances how both adults had deep, rounded grooves in their teeth. Some grooves were so deep they would have exposed the dental pulp. Prof. Brumm remarked, “I was thinking, what the hell were these people doing? It’s like someone had a drill head shaped like a gobstopper and wore away the inner part of the tooth.”
Betel nuts are actually the seeds of the Areca catechu palm but are misnamed because they are often wrapped in betel vine leaves for chewing. Today, the nuts are typically chewed after being mixed with slaked lime made by grinding burnt shells to form a “quid.” Prof. Brumm suspected the unusual tooth wear was caused by the foragers holding hard, round, and abrasive objects in their mouth.
