2,800-Year-Old Siberian Tomb May Show Cannabis Used Before a Human Sacrifice

People in southern Siberia may have used cannabis about 2,800 years ago as part of a funeral ceremony, and one possibility is that it helped calm people who were about to be killed as sacrifices. The clue comes from a burial mound where cannabis seeds and chemical traces of the plant in human hair were found in the same grave.

A mound built for a Scythian funeral

The grave lies at the Tunnug archaeological site, in the Uyuk valley of southern Siberia. Researchers describe it as a royal mound. In the middle of the mound they found four wooden structures holding several coffins made from logs. On top of those wooden structures lay the skeletons of horses. According to the researchers, the horses were once part of what they call a spectral cavalcade, a funeral tradition of the Scythian nomads in which horses and people were sacrificed. That means the mound was not only a place where a body was laid to rest. It was the scene of a ceremony in which living creatures were killed and buried alongside the dead.

More than a thousand seeds, and hair that carried traces

Inside the burial structures, the team found piles of tiny seeds from Cannabis ruderalis, a wild type of cannabis. In total there were more than 1,000 whole seeds and about 500 partial ones. Carbon dating, which estimates age from the remains of once-living material, placed them between 800 and 760 B.C., making this the oldest evidence of cannabis use yet found. The same grave also produced several samples of human hair. When the hair was analyzed, it showed signals matching cannabinol and THC, the chemicals in cannabis that change how a person feels and thinks. The tests could not show how much of the drug anyone had taken, and the seeds and hair do not by themselves prove that a person smoked or ate anything. What they do show is that the plant and its chemistry were present in a single burial.

Why three centuries matter

Earlier evidence of cannabis use had been found in a cemetery in China dated to about 500 B.C. The Siberian grave pushes that date back by three centuries. In the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that Scythian nomads breathed in the fumes from burning hemp seeds. The study notes that cannabis probably came from Asia and was grown thousands of years ago for rope and cloth, and 6,000 years ago as a crop grown for its oil-rich seeds. When people first noticed the plant's effect on the mind is not known.

Gino Caspari, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, and the first author of the study, said the molecular traces in the hair and the cannabis seeds came from the same grave and suggest the plant was used for its intoxicating properties. He and his colleagues also point to the setting. Because the seeds were found in a burial where sacrifices took place, one possibility is that cannabis was used to calm the people who were about to be killed. The findings were published in the journal Science.