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Long before anyone wrote a word about it, people were using cannabis to get high. That is the conclusion of a new study published in the journal Science, based on evidence from a 2,800-year-old tomb in Siberia — the oldest directly dated archaeological evidence of cannabis used for its intoxicating effects, pushing the known history of the practice back by about 300 years.
A princely tomb full of seeds
The evidence comes from Tunnug 1, a monumental burial mound about 140 metres across in the Uyuk Valley of the Republic of Tyva, in southern Siberia near the Mongolian border. The tomb was the last resting place of high-ranking members of Scythian society — the horse-riding nomads of the Eurasian steppe, famous for their warfare on horseback and their gold craftsmanship. Excavations there, which began in 2017, recovered more than 1,400 cannabis seeds associated with the burials, and radiocarbon dating of six of them placed the seeds in the early eighth century BC.
"The seeds show that cannabis played an important role in the rituals surrounding the burial," said lead author Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the University of Bern in Switzerland and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, who led the international team. The seeds were deliberately placed among the dead — not there by accident, the researchers say — which suggests the plant held real significance for the community.
The hair that tells the story
Seeds alone, however, cannot prove that anyone actually consumed the plant for its effects. That evidence came from preserved braids of human hair found in the tomb's central burial chamber. Using high-resolution mass spectrometry, the team found clear chemical signals consistent with cannabinol (CBN) — a compound formed when THC, cannabis's main intoxicating chemical, breaks down — along with weaker signals consistent with THC itself.
"The molecular traces in the hair and the cannabis seeds come from the same grave and suggest that cannabis was used for its intoxicating properties," Caspari said. The team is now sequencing DNA from some of the seeds, which is currently the oldest cannabis DNA known — work that could help trace how the plant spread and was later domesticated.
What the study cannot say — and who disagrees
The researchers are careful about the limits of their findings. The seeds most likely came from wild plants, and it is impossible to tell from the evidence whether they were specifically cultivated for their psychoactive properties. Nor can the study say how much cannabis people consumed, how potent the plants were, or whether the compounds entered their bodies through inhalation or ingestion.
Not every expert is convinced. Volker Auwaerter, head of forensic toxicology at the University Medical Center in Freiburg, Germany, told reporters the hair analysis was "scientifically weak" and that there was not enough evidence to say whether cannabis was used. The debate matters because the claim is a big one: the Greek historian Herodotus wrote about Central Asian peoples smoking cannabis around 440 BC, and the new findings would push deliberate intoxicating use back centuries before that account. For now, the tomb stands as the earliest directly dated evidence we have — and a reminder that humanity's relationship with this plant is far older than its modern history suggests. For more science that rewrites the timeline, see our reports on the ozone hole's biggest year in a decade and NASA's Swift telescope burning up after 22 years in space.