Humans Have Been Getting High for a Long Time: Milky Way News

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—Humans have been getting high for a very long time.

New research from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, recently published in Science Advances, suggests that humans were regularly using betel nuts to alter their minds as early as 25,000 years ago—thousands of years before farming, cities, or even the first known alcoholic beverages.

And the evidence isn't in a stash of ancient drugs—it's in teeth.

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Archaeologists from Griffith University and Indonesian research institutions examined the remains of two prehistoric hunter-gatherers from Sulawesi. Both had an unusual pattern of deep, rounded grooves worn into their teeth.

“We kind of stumbled across the initial evidence by accident,” Dr. Adam Brumm, professor of archaeology at Griffith University, told Milky Way News. Brumm and his team had been excavating a cave site in Sulawesi, and about 10 years ago, they found the skeletal remains of three teeth from the upper jaw of a hunter-forager who lived as long as 25,000 years ago.

“Two of those teeth had these really weird grooves in them—these really deep, rounded grooves that had almost completely worn these two teeth away. And we really couldn’t explain what on earth had formed these grooves.”

Even after consulting with the world’s leading experts in ancient dental wear, no one had a clue. The answer came when Brumm and colleagues found another individual who likely lived between 7,000 and 6,000 years ago, with similar tooth grooves. This time, however, they were in several places and so deep that they had exposed the inner pulp cavities of the teeth, which would have been very painful and likely led to infections.

“At that point, we realized, ‘Okay, we’ve really stumbled across some sort of really interesting cultural tradition that is causing these tooth grooves to form,” Brumm said. “We just thought, it has to have something to do with drugs, otherwise why would you keep doing something that was causing you so much grief?”

And then they thought of a drug that is still commonly used in the region: the betel nut.

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Betel nut comes from the Areca catechu palm and remains widely used across Asia and the Pacific today. It can produce mild euphoria, increased alertness, and pain relief. It is also considered one of the world's most widely used psychoactive substances—fourth, after alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine.

When ingested, betel nut makes one’s saliva look red. Over prolonged use, it has also been found to discolor teeth, and wear them down, as well as lead to dental problems and even oral cancer.

“Where betel nut is chewed regularly, you’ll see people with these really blood-red teeth. And over a lifetime, if you’re not very, very diligently cleaning your teeth every time you use betel nut, then your teeth basically go black,” Brumm said.

At the same time, betel nut’s use is valued by many and considered culturally important.

“For someone coming from Western society, where we’re conditioned to think that teeth have to look bright white to be aesthetically appealing, it’s quite a confronting look,” Brumm added. “But in societies where it’s chewed regularly, people with white teeth are seen as sort of unattractive in some ways—or they’re seen as not engaging properly in society because they’re not chewing betel nut.”

Modern users generally chew the processed seed with slaked lime and other ingredients, creating a preparation called a quid. The lime helps release arecoline more rapidly into the bloodstream. But the ancient Sulawesians seem to have been doing something different: It appears they hadn’t yet discovered the slaked lime trick––and chewed or sucked on the whole betel nut instead. “Almost as though it was a jawbreaker,” Brumm added.

After growing more confident in their betel nut hunch, Brumm and team found further support for it: Chemical analysis detected arecoline, the psychoactive compound in betel nut, within the ancient dental tissues. In other words, these people weren't merely chewing on particularly abrasive snacks. They appear to have been using a psychoactive plant repeatedly, over long periods of time.

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Further experiments suggested that, even without the slaked lime, simply sucking on an intact betel nut can release enough arecoline to have a physiological effect. The researchers tested extracts of betel nuts against cloned human receptors involved in regulating neural activity and found evidence that the compound could affect brain function even without the modern quid preparation.

Unfortunately, there was a catch: Arecoline has analgesic, or painkilling properties. So, when these ancient foragers suffered from poor dental health, sucking on a psychoactive, pain-dulling seed might have seemed like a pretty good idea—except that the seeds were abrasive, which, after repeated use, likely wore down the teeth even more—ironically exacerbating whatever dental issue they were trying to treat.

“We think that this offers hints, at least, at how these early humans were caught in a cycle of addiction, and substance addiction specifically," Brumm said.

And this history of substance use and possible addiction stretches back far longer than previously thought. Researchers have considered agriculture an important turning point in the history of psychoactive substances; some of the earliest known evidence for deliberately produced alcohol, for example, dates to around 13,000 years ago in the Middle East.

The Sulawesi evidence pushes habitual psychoactive drug use dramatically further back—into the Late Pleistocene, when humans were still living as hunter-gatherers. If the interpretation is correct, betel nut use in Sulawesi could represent the earliest recorded evidence of habitual use of a neuroactive plant drug anywhere in the world.

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And there's something oddly familiar about that discovery. Long before humans had pharmacies, liquor stores, coffee shops, or modern medicine, they were already experimenting with plants that could change how their bodies and brains felt. Sometimes, apparently, they even discovered that the thing making a toothache feel better was also slowly destroying their teeth.

The ancient human relationship with drugs, it seems, was already complicated 25,000 years ago.

“I think it’s a good insight into the sorts of trouble that we can cause for ourselves when we overuse drugs—even in the very very ancient past,” Brumm added.

For better or worse, seeking temporary relief that prolongs pain may be a habit that’s just as old as we are.