For decades, cannabis fruits, fibers, and pollen have turned up in archaeological digs across Europe and Asia. Now a team of researchers from the Free University of Berlin has created a database with all these records, and after analyzing them they propose the theory that the use of cannabis began 10,000 years ago .
Specialists Tengwen Long and Pavel Tarasov have identified patterns and trends in the archaeological record that would indicate that the use of cannabis began at the end of the last ice age , when humans in Europe and Asia began to use, apparently independently, a new plant.
Until now it was thought that cannabis was first used and domesticated somewhere in China or Eastern Europe, but the new study reveals that it appears in the archaeological records of Japan and Eastern Europe at almost the same time, between 11,500 and 10,200 years.
They therefore suggest that different groups of individuals across Europe and Asia they would have begun to use the plant at that time, independently without having contact with each other , probably due to its psychoactive effects , but also as a source of food or medicine , and even as a raw material to manufacture fabrics .
The herb was used regularly in the western part of the Eurasian continent, until one of the three key tribes considered to be the founders of Western civilization, the Yamna, would also be responsible for the expansion of cannabis use throughout Asia, that intensified at the beginning of the Bronze Age, about 5,000 years ago.
This coincided with the appearance of the nomadic horsemen of the steppes , which made it possible to cover great distances in less time and lay the foundations for what would become the famous Silk Road. It would be through this incipient route of the Bronze Age where the exchanges of all kinds of products, including cannabis, would spread.
Tengwen Long states in New Scientist that it is still a hypothesis that needs more evidence to be confirmed, but also considers that cannabis could be a kind of exchange currency , before coinage made its appearance in history.
The study was published at the end of June in Vegetation History and Archaeobotany.