More History of Cannabis Use

 Ancients enjoyed the myriad health and psychodelic benefits of cannabis. 

Hopefully the wisdom of the ancients will take hold of federal lawmakers and the federal prohibition against a plant that is both healthful  and enjoyable will soon end. It has damaged more than enough folks lives over the last 100 years.

Scientists Find Ancient Humans Used Weed 2,500 Years Ago, Too

Dense patches of wild cannabis grow across the mountain foothills of Eurasia from the Caucuses to East Asia. These plants were photographed growing in the Tian Shan Mountains of Kazakhstan.

Credit...

Robert Spengler

An association between weed and the dead turns out to have been established long before the 1960s and far beyond a certain ur-band’s stomping grounds in San Francisco.

Researchers have identified strains of cannabis burned in mortuary rituals as early as 500 B.C., deep in the Pamir mountains in western China, according to a new study published Wednesday. The residue had chemical signatures indicating high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the plant’s most psychoactive, or mood-altering, compound.

You think the Grateful Dead were the first to wonder “what in the world ever became of sweet Jane?” That CBD gummies to assuage the anxious are anything new? That puffs of elevated consciousness started with Rocky Mountain highs?

Nah.

“Modern perspectives on cannabis vary tremendously cross-culturally, but it is clear that the plant has a long history of human use, medicinally, ritually and recreationally over countless millennia,” said Robert Spengler, an archaeobotanist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, who worked on the study.

Cannabis stems and seeds had previously been found at a handful of burial sites around Eurasia, but the evidence at the Pamir cemetery, verified by advanced scientific technology, shows an even more direct connection between the plant and early ritual. The new findings expand the geographical range of cannabis use within the broader Central Asian region, said Mark Merlin, a professor of botany at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who did not work on the research.

"The fact that strongly psychoactive ancient residue has been documented in laboratory testing is the key new finding,” said Dr. Merlin, a cannabis historian. He hypothesized that “It was used to facilitate the body communicating with the afterlife, the spirit world.”

The study was published in the journal Science Advances. The research team included archaeologists and chemists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing.

About 70 artifacts have been retrieved from the Pamir burial site so far, including glass beads, harps, pieces of silk and wooden bowls and plates. Perforations and cuts in some skulls and bones could suggest human sacrifice.

“WWe can start to piece together an image of funerary rites that included flames, rhythmic music and hallucinogen smoke, all intended to guide people into an altered state of mind,” the authors wrote in the study.

Much more of interest BELOW the FOLD.

Image 

Cannabis Flower