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posted by martyb on Friday May 10 2019, @08:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the why-booze-when-you-can-bong? dept.

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)


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 10 2019, @11:46PM (6 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 10 2019, @11:46PM (#842141) Journal

    This is the tough part, because those accounts were used to calibrate the radiocarbon reference curve.

    False [wikipedia.org]

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:06AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:06AM (#842150)

    Among Libby’s first tests was Egyptian material with known historical age, but to more fully explore
    radiocarbon’s accuracy, he enlisted the assistance of archaeologists and geologists from their respec-
    tive professional societies to identify appropriate samples (Libby 1967). The initially reported rela-
    tionship between historical age and 14 C activity (Arnold and Libby 1949), called the “Curve of
    Knowns,” contained 2 samples dendrodated by A E Douglass himself along with 4 other samples
    dated from historical records (including wood from other sources not dated by dendrochronology).
    The younger sample was a Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menzesii) post (Figure 2) from a pithouse at
    Broken Flute Cave in the Red Rock Valley of northeastern Arizona whose ring sequence dated from
    AD 530 to 623, provided by Terah L (“Ted”) Smiley of LTRR. The older sample, called “redwood”
    by Libby but properly termed “giant sequoia” (Sequoiadendron giganteum), was from the “Centen-
    nial Tree” (Figure 3) in the Sierra Nevada of California, which contained rings from 1031 to 928 BC
    as provided by Edmund Schulman. The “Curve of Knowns” was expanded over the years by Libby
    and colleagues until a much later version (Libby 1961) added another piece of dated wood from
    LTRR (provenience not specified in that publication) and 7 additional samples dated from written
    records.

    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)

      by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:14AM (#842154) Journal

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:37AM (#842162)

        The dates of ancient Egyptian artifacts primarily come from:

        Joseph Justus Scaliger (/ˈskælɪdʒər/; 5 August 1540 – 21 January 1609) was a French religious leader and scholar, known for expanding the notion of classical history from Greek and ancient Roman history to include Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and ancient Egyptian history. He spent the last sixteen years of his life in the Netherlands.
        [...]
        It was reserved for his edition of Manilius (1579), and his De emendatione temporum (1583), to revolutionize perceived ideas of ancient chronology—to show that ancient history is not confined to that of the Greeks and Romans, but also comprises that of the Persians, the Babylonians and the Egyptians, hitherto neglected, and that of the Jews, hitherto treated as a thing apart; and that the historical narratives and fragments of each of these, and their several systems of chronology, must be critically compared.

        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:

        Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (11 February 1380[2] – 30 October 1459), best known simply as Poggio Bracciolini, was an Italian scholar and an early humanist. He was responsible for rediscovering and recovering a great number of classical Latin manuscripts, mostly decaying and forgotten in German, Swiss, and French monastic libraries.

        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:

        The oldest samples of known age
        measured were "Hemaka" and "Zet"
        from the Ist Dynasty in Egypt. Both
        were wood found in the subterranean
        brick structures of the Ist Dynasty
        tombs of the Vizier Hemaka and of
        King Zet, both at Saqqara. Hemaka was
        contemporaneous with King Udimu,
        and both tombs were generally agreed
        to date from 4900 + 200 years before
        the present. The next oldest samples
        were cedar wood from the upper cham-
        ber of the Southern Pyramid of Sneferu
        at Dahshur. The next sample, marked
        "Sesostris," is a very interesting one. It
        is a part of the deck of the funeral
        ship which was placed in the tomb of
        Sesostris III of Egypt and is now in the
        Chicago Museum of Natural History.
        It is about 20 feet long and six feet
        wide and is quite an imposing object,
        complete with paddles. The next sample
        is "Aha-nakht." It consists of wood,
        probably cedar, from the outer sar-
        cophagus of Aha-nakht, at El Bersheh.
        It was found in the tomb, which was
        covered with earth. The coffin was pre-
        sumably excavated by the natives at the
        same time as the El Bersheh coffin ob-
        tained for the British Museum by
        E. -A. W. Budge, after 1895.
        [...etc... it is a pain to copy/paste]

        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)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:11AM (#842172)

        Joseph Scaligers father is also very interesting:

        Julius Caesar[!!!] Scaliger (/ˈskælɪdʒər/; April 23, 1484 – October 21, 1558), or Giulio Cesare della Scala, was an Italian scholar and physician, who spent a major part of his career in France. He employed the techniques and discoveries of Renaissance humanism to defend Aristotelianism against the New Learning. In spite of his arrogant and contentious disposition, his contemporary reputation was high. Jacques Auguste de Thou claimed that none of the ancients could be placed above him and that he had no equal in his own time.[1]

        In 1512 at the Battle of Ravenna, where his father and elder brother were killed, his conduct earned him Order of the Golden Spur, augmented with the collar and the eagle of gold.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar_Scaliger [wikipedia.org]

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:20PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:20PM (#842296)

          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

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @05:34PM (#842389)

        And his father (who was accused of making up his own family history) had a friend named Mark Antony:

        When a certain Mark Anthony of the famous Italian family of the Roveres arrived in Agen, in Southwestern France, in the second decade of the sixteenth century, he brought along with him his personal physician, Mas-ter Julius Caesar, who had been under the protection of his family for some time.

        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.