component, and so lacked mind-altering properties. One academic
who works in Central Asia said he and colleagues tried to smoke and
eat wild varieties—but got no buzz.
Ancient people put cannabis leaves and hot stones in this
brazier, and likely inhaled the resulting smoke.
XINHUA WU
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The cannabis burned 2500 years ago at the Jirzankal cemetery,
3000 meters high in the Pamir Mountains in far western China, was
different. Excavations there have uncovered skeletons and wooden
plates, bowls, and Chinese harps, as well as wooden braziers that held
burning material. All are typical of the Sogdians, a people of western
China and Tajikistan who generally followed the Persian faith of
Zoroastrianism, which later celebrated the mind-expanding properties
of cannabis in sacred texts. At Jirzankal, glass beads typical of Western
Asia and silk from China confirm the long-distance trade for which
the Sogdians became famous, and isotopic analysis of 34 skeletons
showed that nearly a third were migrants. Radiocarbon analysis put
the burials at about 500 B.C.E.
The wooden braziers were concentrated in the more elite tombs.
Yang's and Ren's team ground bits of brazier into powder and applied
gas chromatography and mass spectrometry to identify chemical
compounds left behind. They found unusually high levels of THC
compared with typical wild cannabis, although much less than in
today's highly bred plants. The cannabis was apparently burned in
an enclosed space, so mourners almost certainly inhaled THC-laced
fumes, the authors say, making this the earliest solid evidence of
cannabis use for psychoactive purposes...
The region's high altitude could have stressed the cannabis, creating
plants naturally high in THC, says co-author Robert Spengler, also of
MPI-SHH. "It is quite likely that people came across cannabis plants at
higher elevations that were naturally producing higher THC levels," he
says. But humans may also have intervened to breed a more wicked
weed, he adds.
"The methods are convincing, and the data are unambiguous regarding
early use of cannabis as a psychoactive substance," says Tengwen
Long, an environmental scientist at the University of Nottingham in
the United Kingdom who has researched cannabis origins. But Megan
Cifarelli, an art historian at Manhattanville College in Purchase,
New York, who has studied ancient drug use, notes the aromatic
fumes might also have had another purpose: to mask the smell of a
putrefying corpse.
In 440 B.C.E., the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the nomadic
Scythians, who controlled vast areas from Siberia to Eastern Europe,
made tents and heated rocks in order to inhale hemp vapors that made
them "shout for joy." And Andrei Belinski, an archaeologist based at
the heritage museum in Stavropol, Russia, in 2013 began to excavate
a nearby 2400-year-old Scythian tomb that held gold vessels bearing
residues of both opium and cannabis, supporting the idea that elites
used the drug first.
"Ancient artwork and textual references from Syria to China hint at
even earlier cannabis drug use, and the new analytical methods could
soon provide concrete evidence of this," says Michael Frachetti, an
archaeologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. "But it's
already clear that the ancient Silk Road trafficked in more than spices,
grains, and ideas.
"
Crops weren't just about food, he says.
"They were also about making contact
with another world. q
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