Traces of five drugs found on 1000-year-old South American ritual kit
A 1000-year-old collection of drug paraphernalia found in a rock shelter in Bolivia features traces of five psychoactive chemicals, including cocaine and components of ayahuasca. This is the largest number of psychoactive compounds detected in a single archaeological find in South America, the researchers say. The plants they come from aren't native to the highland area where they were found, so they may have been brought there by trading networks or travelling shamans.
[...] Radiocarbon dating puts the date of the bag at AD 905 to 1170, roughly coinciding with the collapse of the Tiwanaku state, a once-powerful Andean civilisation that endured for around five centuries. Drugs are thought to have played an important role in Tiwanaku culture, possibly in healing ceremonies and religious rituals believed to enable contact with the dead.
Melanie Miller at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and her colleagues used mass spectrometry to analyse samples from the pouch and plant stems. They detected five psychoactive compounds: cocaine, benzoylecgonine (BZE), bufotenine, harmine and dimethyltryptamine (DMT).
Also at Berkeley News, Science Magazine, National Geographic, and ScienceAlert.
Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1902174116) (DX)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @08:35PM (14 children)
How exactly did they arrive at this date?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @09:21PM (13 children)
Hint... It was 1019 years ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @09:47PM (12 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Hardouin [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Johnson_(historian) [wikipedia.org]
So what exact evidence did they use to date this to that time?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 10 2019, @10:47PM (8 children)
So what exact evidence did they use to date this to that time?
Hint: not written accounts, much less English Christian ones. 'Cause they couldn't find any in that rock shelter in Bolivia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @11:27PM (7 children)
This is the tough part, because those accounts were used to calibrate the radiocarbon reference curve. Ie, this one: https://i.stack.imgur.com/SK8DR.png [imgur.com] (http://www.radiocarbon.org/IntCal13.htm)
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 10 2019, @11:46PM (6 children)
False [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:06AM (5 children)
True: https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/article/viewFile/3496/3012 [arizona.edu]
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:14AM (4 children)
No texts written by English Christian monks were used for dating, then.
Which makes the method totally reliable (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:37AM
The dates of ancient Egyptian artifacts primarily come from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Justus_Scaliger [wikipedia.org]
Much of his source material was the bible and what this guy found and became rich off:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poggio_Bracciolini [wikipedia.org]
All those "decaying manuscripts" that supposedly lasted 1500 years in random European libraries have since been "lost".
You can read that Libby 1961 paper to see he just took the historians word for it:
Libby, W. F. (1961). Radiocarbon Dating: The method is of increasing use to the archeologist, the geologist, the meteorologist, and the oceanographer. Science, 133(3453), 621–629. doi:10.1126/science.133.3453.621
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:11AM (1 child)
Joseph Scaligers father is also very interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar_Scaliger [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:20PM
It's also interesting to look at the lifespan of all these people. Not much different from today, despite all supposed medical advances in the last 400 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @05:34PM
And his father (who was accused of making up his own family history) had a friend named Mark Antony:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1005626 [jstor.org]
This is too ridiculous. So the guy responsible for our modern chronology had a father (who it is thought made up a fake history for himself) named Julius Caesar with a friend named Mark Antony.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @10:52PM (2 children)
Radiocarbon dating puts the date of the bag at AD 905 to 1170. Or if you believe the Earth is flat (Dark Ages between 700 and 1400 A. D. had never occurred) then it was a wibbily wobbly timey wimey malfunction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @11:31PM (1 child)
Yes, of course. But how exactly was the info plugged into this radiocarbon dating equation arrived at?
The delta-C14/delta-C12 ratio is not constant over time, so it needs to be calibrated to something else. It is possible they did this *only* by sampling from tree rings without using any (possibly incorrectly dated) historical references, but how do we find out?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:37AM
OK... They took a wild guess.