Bronze-age humans liked to get high, too

Hair from a 3,000-year-old burial site in Menorca, Spain, contains the oldest known evidence that humans in Europe took hallucinogenic drugs to get high, per a peer-reviewed study published last Thursday in Scientific Reports.

And if you’re wondering how we know this, it’s not a Hot Tub Time Machine-type situation – no one went back in time to attend a party. After analyzing locks of human hair found at the burial site, which had been dyed red as part of an unknown ritual, Spanish researchers detected three psychoactive substances: atropine, scopolamine, and ephedrine. All three drugs are naturally produced by plants growing on the small Mediterranean island of Menorca.

• The scientists say the fact that these substances could prove dangerous if ingested improperly shows early European humans possessed “highly specialized knowledge” regarding the use and side-effects of hallucinogenic drugs. Aka the people consuming them thousands of years ago seemed to know what they were doing.

🌎🪴 One interesting thing: Scopolamine and atropine can be found among plants in the nightshade family (genus Datura), which for centuries has been associated with witchcraft and sorcery in the Western world (especially in pre-Columbian South America).

For example: in the Indigenous Shuar communities of the Amazon Rainforest, children were often disciplined with a psychoactive juice called maikua – made from scopolamine-containing Brugmansia flowers – which caused the youngsters to fall into a trance wherein they would learn wisdom from their elders.