Archaeologists Find Old Pot
Well this is a very different kind of pot for archaeologists. What they found was a marijuana stash.
OTTAWA - Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.Now there was one dedicated pot head. Not even death was going to separate him from his stash. No wonder it is so hard to keep the weed out of America if that kind of dedication is any indication of the mind set of current users.
The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.
The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.
"To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent," says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.
Remnants of cannabis have been found in ancient Egypt and other sites, and the substance has been referred to by authors such as the Greek historian Herodotus. But the tomb stash is the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties.
Cross Posted at Classical Values
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