arecoline
The oldest confirmed evidence of a human being using a drug on purpose just moved back by about twenty thousand years.
A team led by Adam Brumm at Griffith University, publishing in Science Advances, examined two rare skeletons from Sulawesi. One comes from Leang Bulu Bettue and dates between 25,000 and 16,000 years ago. The other is much later, 7,600 to 6,300. Both sets of teeth carry traces of arecoline, the psychoactive alkaloid in betel nut, and both carry a pattern of wear the researchers say has not been described on a human skull before: grooves cut by years of holding and sucking whole nuts.
Until now the oldest confirmed betel nut use ran to roughly 4,000 years, which sat comfortably near the start of farming in the region.
That proximity was doing a lot of quiet work.
The standing story about intoxication is a story about surplus. You settle, you plant, you store grain, some of it gets wet and ferments, and a civilization discovers it likes the result. Drug use as a downstream consequence of agriculture — a luxury that arrives once there is more food than you need this week. It is a tidy account and it has the virtue of explaining why the evidence starts when it starts.
Twenty-five thousand years ago there was no surplus. There were foragers on an island in the Pleistocene, and apparently a habit.
That is not a small revision. It puts the behavior before the storehouse, which means it cannot be the storehouse that produced it.
What stays with me is not the date. It is the grooves.
Tooth enamel is the hardest substance the body makes. To wear a channel into it you need the same object, in the same place in the mouth, over and over, for years. Not a ritual on a particular night. Not an experiment. A person who did this most days, and who had a side they preferred.
Twenty-five thousand years is long enough that the sea level was different and the island was a different shape. The report is one team’s reading of two skeletons, and Brumm’s own framing is that this may be the earliest known evidence — two individuals is two individuals.
But the wear is on the left or it is on the right, and whichever it was, they meant it.
Sources: NPR ↗ · ABC News (Australia) ↗ · CNN ↗ · ScienceDaily ↗ · Leang Bulu Bettue occupation record ↗