An ancient grave reveals the oldest cannabis plants ever discovered

therevverend said:

When I'm dead and buried I want to take my plants with me. This guy did, an approximately 35 year old man was dug up along with 13 cannabis plants laid diagonally across his chest. The plants were 3 feet long with the roots orientated under his pelvis and the plants extending just under his chin, up and along the left side of his face.

https://news.nationalgeographic.com...iscovery-scythians-turpan-archaeology-botany/

Radiocarbon dating of the tomb places it at 2400-2800 BP. The man had Caucasian features which is common in northwestern China from that period. The burial is associated with the Subeixi culture who were the first permanent inhabitants of the Turpan Basin. At this time they were transitioning from a nomadic lifestyle to agriculture. Growing wheat, barley, and broomcorn millet.

The cannabis is so well preserved you can see the individual glandular trichomes! The plants were likely buried fresh which means they came from the area of burial. The flowers were mostly trimmed away but the few that remained contained immature seed. (leave the poor guy his buds!)

No textiles have been found associated with Turpan burials. The article says the seeds were too small for food but I don't see why that would matter. It's important to note that these people weren't Scythians but they knew the Scythians, probably traded with and fought with them.

I've seen seeds from Scythian burial sites and they're tiny. Very similar to seeds from modern feral hemp from eastern China. Much smaller then modern drug or hemp seeds. The plants were mature and only 3 feet tall. This tells me they're either wild hemp/Ruderalis or hemp in the process of being domesticated.

The article says

'the researchers suspect the plants were grown for psychoactive resin which was either inhaled as a sort of incense or consumed in a beverage for ritual or medicinal purposes'.

It's either burned like sage or other medicinal herbs in a smudge pot or brazier, as incense, or made into a bhang type beverage, not smoked from a pipe. Pipes entered Eurasia along with tobacco during the Columbian Exchange. (Pre-Columbus pipes have been discovered in medieval Africa but we'll save that for another time. Lots of interesting ganja stuff going on in Africa)

Since textiles weren't found in the graves and the seed was 'too small' they conclude the Subiexi were cultivating (or gathering, I wouldn't rule out wild populations) the cannabis exclusively for drug use. That seems much too extravagant for semi-nomadic subsistence farmers. Cannabis is too useful and life is too hard in the desert to waste anything.

Across the world the hemp plant is venerated, we focus narrowly on the drug because we're stoners but the other uses for the plant are more important in many cultures. Especially as you get further from the equator and THC levels drop. In China, Japan, Korea, Europe, the hemp plant is a part of burial and funeral rituals.

In 21st century Korea mourners still wear hemp clothing to funerals. In England in the 19th century it was considered good luck to keep a piece of hemp rope from a hanging in your pocket. I pick these examples at random because I enjoy them, there's countless others across the world. For thousands of years hemp has been worshiped as part of death and burial rituals.

In this context it's interesting that these ancient people also made cannabis a part of their funeral ritual along with other plants an herbs that were important to them. Cannabis wasn't the only medicinal plant found in these sort of burials.

Another thing worth considering is that these plants weren't potent at all. Wild plants in nearby Kazakhstan collected for hashish have around 3.5% THC, plants closer to the burial site in Mongolia and China have much lower amounts. Considering these were likely wild or hemp plants, there's no evidence of hashish making and the cannabis was not directly inhaled, they wouldn't get you super baked.

They would have probably contained quite a bit of CBD along with whatever THC there was and while it wouldn't have got them ripped it would work as good medicine. I've seen studies that show small amounts of CBD go a long way. And if you made a beverage you could make it much much stronger if you wanted a shamanistic trip.

This is getting long but there's quite a bit more to say, especially about the Scythians and why cannabis was so important to these people. Next post we'll get into the famous Scythian solid gold bongs!!

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therevverend said:

The golden Scythian bong turned out to be a bit disappointing but still a great find. I've been holding out and playing devil's advocate because for me circumstantial evidence is not enough. I want proof that before the time of Christ there were people breeding and consuming cannabis specifically for a high THC content. How in the hell would you ever find that? Well, we got it baby!

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/28034925...-marijuana-stash-totally-busted/#.XEjpPNQrJ8s

The man was found in the Turpan Basin in the same area of Western China and of the same culture as the man with the cannabis plants I described earlier. This dude likely died about 200 years earlier. He was around 45 years old, had blue eyes and light colored hair. His grave gifts were more elaborate then in neighboring graves which has led archaeologists to believe he was a shaman.

I think he may have been more then 'just a shaman'. Many of the objects found with him were connected to horsemanship. There was also a bow, arrows, and wooden cups. His stash consisted of a large lidless leather basket and a bowl containing 789 grams of female cannabis inflorescences and seeds. The wooden bowl shows prolonged use as a mortar with one side perforated.

It looks like the ganja would be ground up in the bowl before use. Just like making bhang. The ganja consists of leaves, stems, seeds, and bracts with nonglandular and glandular trichomes intact after 2500 years. If he was taking the cannabis with him to the afterlife why would he leave the bracts and leaves? No hemp textiles have been unearthed in the tombs.

As I mentioned earlier there's no evidence the ancient people of the Turpan Basin were using cannabis for food, oil, or fiber. As an aside I don't think the small size of the seeds rules them out as food but they probably weren't good for oil. The presence of the mature female inflorescenes, the most potent part, suggests these guys knew what they were doing.

Among the shamanic tribes of Central Asia and Siberia shamans would act as physicians and ritual practitioners and probably used the psychoactive ganja as part of their purification and healing ceremonies. Ancient records from China also point to this use of cannabis, allowing a ritual of communication between the human and spirit world.

Interdisciplinary research by an international team of scientists 'demonstrated through botanical examination, phytochemical investigation and genetic DNA analysis by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) that this cannabis material contained THC.' (Doesn't that sound better then the guy I ripped on earlier who sent the 'golden bong' samples to the Russian Narc Police?) The team concluded the Yanghai cannabis was used by the culture as a medicine or psychoactive agent, or to aid in divination.

It represents the oldest evidence of cannabis use to get high. Genetic analysis suggests that it was cultivated rather then wild! I've looked at pictures of a resinous bract, the bowl and basket, the tomb, and the stash. I mentioned earlier what feral cannabis seed looks like in that region of China. The seeds don't look like that they look like good brown ganja seeds.

To this day the Uighur people of the region are associated with cannabis and it's use by them has been documented in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. There's a popular opinion among Chinese that Uighur smoke 'smells foul' and this has hampered the spread of cannabis use to the Han Chinese. This negative popular and official attitude towards the psychoactive use of cannabis by the majority of Chinese has prevailed for hundreds of years but it may have been much different before the rise of Confucianism. We'll save that for later..

I need to point out that the Uighur are currently the victims of what is rapidly becoming a genocide.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...hinas-actions-could-be-precursors-to-genocide

Parents are separated from children, they are sent to concentration camps for brainwashing. Muslims, they are forced to drink alcohol and eat pork instead of the tasty hashish they prefer. Forced to stand for hours chanting crazy communist Chinese slogans and numerous other cruel tortures and brainwashing. Their struggle for human rights and self determination is considered terrorism by the Chinese government and labeled as radical Islam. Their ancient culture is being destroyed and the Western world is indifferent.

Analysis of the shaman's cannabis shows that it's been selectively bred for THC for at least several generations. If plants are not bred for cannibinoids they have roughly an equal amount of CBD to THC. With a few plants showing high THC and a few showing high CBD. These plants show very little CBD and high THC like modern drug cultivars. Keep in mind it's unknown how potent the plants were but they were selected for THC. Which means earliest landrace discovered so far! Yee haw!

Genetically the plants the are related to modern feral plants in the area which is unsurprising. What is surprising is they are unrelated to modern drug strains that originated in East Asia, spread from China to India, and spread to the rest of the world. They may be more closely related to the European/Siberian narrow leaf hemp ancestor.

I should explain that today there are two main types of cannabis Cannabis Indica and Cannabis Sativa originating from two different lineages. Where it differs from what 'we' were taught is that Cannabis Sativa is narrow leaf Siberian/European hemp. All other cannabis is Cannabis Indica. Including Japanese, Korean, and Chinese hemp and seed strains plus almost all psychoactive cannabis.

This makes the shaman's cannabis incredibly unique and important, I mean more so then it already is. As Squatty mentions above ancient date palm seeds have been sprouted. I doubt the ancient cannabis could sprout it's different then date palm seeds and probably much to desiccated. Science is crazy though, I wonder if there's a way to take the genetic structure DNA baby part and 'graft' it onto a fresh living seed?

There's so much more to say but I've already spent much too much time on this. I'll try to add more later including pre-Confucius Chinese ganja history and Scythian funerary rituals. Here's a link to something cool I found, the oldest bong ever discovered. It was used in Ming China for tobacco.

https://sfevergreen.com/could-this-be-the-worlds-oldest-bong/

Keep in mind the trippy Ethiopian bongs aren't really bongs but ceramic bowls that may have attached onto bongs. Now it's got me thinking about how they might have been used, maybe they didn't attach to bongs at all but some other creative way of smoking or vaporizing that's been lost to time. I need to find the pictures and get high and think about it.

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If drug cannabis is closer related to european cannabis than I wonder if it came to modern China through indo europeans that inhabited central asia first

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therevverend said:

You're misunderstanding I should write it more clearly. Modern drug cannabis originated in ancient China then spread to ancient India along the edge of the Himalayas around the south side. Then spread to Africa, SE Asia, the rest of the world. This is what modern botanists consider Cannabis Indica. When it reached central Asia from India it may have hybridized with the hemp strains there to create modern Cannabis Indica Afghanica.

The drug strain these people were breeding doesn't exist in the modern world. Or hasn't been tested by modern scientists. Their strain is very similar to the wild or feral hemp in North Eastern China and Siberia which makes sense. I've always wondered what the modern Chinese Turkestan strains are like. I've heard of samples of hashish occasionally making it to Europe but it's rare. I've never seen or heard of drug seeds from the region I don't know if it's even been tested. I'd guess a drug/hemp hybrid.

I was saving it for a longer post but I'll do a quick rundown of how it's thought cannabis dispersed. This is new cutting edge stuff, it's a bit different then what we've been taught. Up until a few years ago it was thought cannabis originated from a small population in Central Asia and dispersed to India and Europe. The strain that spread to India became marijuana (drug) and the strain that spread to Europe became hemp.

It's turning out to be much more complicated. During the last ice age central Eurasia became frozen mammoth steppe. Cannabis had to find refuge in warmer areas like northern Iran, China, southern Europe, and maybe India. I've always read, it's been common knowledge, that cannabis is not native to India. This has been believed to be true since the Indian Hemp Commissions Report in the 19th century.

It's possible that the Himalayas were one of the places cannabis sat out the Ice Age which would make it native to parts of India. The problem with India is that nobody's looked. Now that we are looking there the date keeps getting pushed back. We've been taught that the Aryans introduced cannabis to India from Central Asia. It turns out that cannabis was there long before the Aryans, it's turning up from 5500 years before present at least. Indians have never used cannabis for fiber so it's likely it was drug cannabis.

At the end of the Ice Age the cannabis range contracted back towards Central Asia but not all the way. It turns out the Hemp Ancestor likely came from the Northern Caucasus in Eastern Europe 10,000 years BP rather then central Asia. And the drug ancestor likely came from the Hengduan Mountain region of south eastern China near China's border with Tibet 10,000 years BP. This is Cannabis Indica. From here it spread NW into the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys and Korea to become eastern hemp and seed strains plus south to India to become all the drug varieties. It's all genetically Cannabis Indica although some of it is low in THC.

These two types still probably originated in Central Asia before they split but it was long before domestication, more like 50,000-100,000 years BP. The 50,000 year date is interesting because that's when modern humans reached central Asia. Indica and Sativa didn't meet again until Indica reached Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey and hybridized with the hemp there. All this new information is a lot to swallow and it keeps blowing my mind.

It's what happens when cannabis research is suppressed through the 20th century and the only information you can find is in books at head shops. Written by either Ed Rosenthal or I.M. Stoney. Now that cannabis is the new hip thing for researchers plus new DNA testing and archeobotanical evidence our knowledge is expanding rapidly.

One other thing I should mention. A cannabis sativa (European/Siberian hemp) strain can be bred into a high THC drug variety just as much as a cannabis indica drug variety can be bred into a hemp fiber type. The two groups are created because of genetic similarity not necessarily use. Most times we should think of Sativa as narrow leaf hemp and most Indica is high THC drug cannabis but it's not a rule that they have to be. The Tarim Basin is one example but there are quite a few drug strains that have lots of hemp genes.

Oh, and the Tarim Basin mummies are on the Silk Road but they're pre-Silk Road. Of course they were on the highway between West and East but the classical Silk Road we all think of connected Rome to China wasn't there. I know Water knows but I wanted to clarify, when we think of the Silk Road we think of a major highway with guards, rest stops, toll booths, watering holes, restaurants, none of that was built up yet. At this point it was a bunch of Scythians and other tribes that must have had a trading network but who were as likely to rob you and slit your throat as invite you into their hut for a cup of smoke and a drug fueled orgy.

Which reminds me maybe a better name for the golden Scythian bong, the artifact of an open vessel for burning cannabis, has been called a pipe-cup by some archaeologists. A buddy of mine used to have a device called a bedside smoker

https://i.imgur.com/T0Dug.jpg

He'd put large mugs in the freezer until they were ice cold. Then he'd squeeze the smoke out of the bedside smoker into the mug. The cold would cause the smoke to sit in the cup. You'd 'drink' the smoke and get baked. It was a fun novelty but sometimes the cherry would fall off and smolder in the plastic, after a few uses it started to smell foul. I doubt the Scythians were doing bedside smoker cups but it's as good a name as any. I'll get more into what was really going on with the Scythians hopefully soon.

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