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An ancient grave reveals the oldest cannabis plants ever discovered

therevverend

Well-known member
Veteran
Water, I'm getting a lot of this from Robert Connell Clarke and Mark D Merlin's Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany. It was a bit pricey but worth every penny. It's more of a textbook I'm in awe of the amount of research it took to write it. It came out in 2015 so it's current. I'm getting some of this from the internet especially background but the details that aren't in the articles are coming from the book. The book ties the information together.

The India date of 5000 BP is for pollen recovered from Lahuradewa Lake in the middle of the Ganges plane. I may have mis-remembered the 5500 BP date or found it in a different part of the book. It was associated with pollen of cereals and other economic plants. He says to take the date with caution because hops pollen looks the same as cannabis pollen. But as far as we know hops came to SE Asia at a more recent time.

Charcoal was dated from Bihar in India from 3000-2600 BP. In Pakistan at the famous Harappa site on the banks of the Ravi river cannabis has been found in the form of rare opal phytoliths. These are tiny 3 dimensional inclusions of plant cells formed as a product of absorbing water from silica. Analysis of phytoliths has provided evidence of a number of useful plants at Harappa including the hairs on the leaf epidermis of cannabis. They've been dated to 3800-3300 BP.

This makes 3300 BP a likely date for drug types to have entered India if they weren't there before that. The Harappa culture didn't use hemp for fiber. The most likely use is medicine or drug and strains from that latitude tend to be high in THC. I

Here's a little gem I just found. 'The student ninja plants a batch of hemp when he begins training and endeavors to leap over it every day. At first there is no challenge, but the hemp grows quickly every day and so does the diligent warrior's jumping ability. But by the end of the season, the warrior can clear the 3-4 meter high hemp.'

And a different version of the old tale. 'A long time ago, it is said that hemp plants were cultivated in gardens and you would jump over them. I learned all this from an old man, and was told that if you were not spirited when you jumped over the hemp plants you would die around that time, but this is the way to fly like a ninja.'

It's got to be hell for pot growers in Japan, getting woken up in the middle of the night. Damnit Yoko the ninjas are jumping over the ganja again. Better get the nunchucks!
 

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