SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submission Preview
Cannabis Residue Found in Ancient Chinese Tomb
Oldest evidence of cannabis smoking found in ancient Chinese cemetery [arstechnica.com]
The broken wooden braziers, unearthed from 2,500-year-old tombs in Western China, contained burned, blackened stones, and the interior of the wooden vessels also looked charred. To find out what had been burned in them, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences archaeologist Yemin Yang and his colleagues used gas chromatography/mass spectrometry to analyze small samples of the charred wood and the residue from the stones.
Their analysis turned up a chemical called cannabinol, or CBN—an unmistakable chemical signature of cannabis. Those ancient chemical traces offer an important clue in the history of human drug use and the domestic history of cannabis.
[...] Although cannabis has turned up at other sites, from Western China to the Altai Mountains in Siberia, archaeologists have never found such direct indications that ancient people were lighting it up. Elsewhere, cannabis plants buried with the dead may be a sign that people ate parts of the plant for a similar effect (although brownies wouldn't be invented for millennia). But without doing a similar chemical analysis on human remains from those graves, archaeologists can't say for sure. At other sites, like a burial in the Altai Mountains of Siberia where archaeologists found a small tent, a bowl, and a pouch of cannabis seeds, it's pretty reasonable to speculate that the cannabis involved may have been intended for use as a drug.
[...] The burned residue in the Jirzankou braziers provides the first direct evidence of people burning cannabis for its smoke, but it's also the first unambiguous indication of people using the plant specifically for its mind-altering effects. Yang and his colleagues' chemical analysis found that the cannabis plants burned at the cemetery had been very high in THC, which makes them different from domesticated hemp plants and from most of the wild cannabis that grows on hillsides from the Caucasus to Western China.
The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs [sciencemag.org] (open, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw1391) (DX [doi.org])
