Stoned in the Stone Age - When Did Humans Start Experimenting With Drugs and Alcohol?

Art by the Sandawe, Hadzabe, Irangi, Pygmies and San tribes of Africa (with bits by N. Longrich)

Humans alter our world. We turn stone, wood, and metal into tools; we fire fields, change forests into farmland; we breed plants and animals. But humans don't just reshape the external world, we also engineer our internal worlds, and we remake our minds.

One way we do this is upgrade our mental 'software', so to speak, with myths and religion, philosophy and psychology. The other way to alter our minds is to change the workings of the hardware, our brains. And we do that using chemistry.

Humans use thousands of psychoactive compounds to alter our experience of the world. Most of these derive from plants and fungi, others we manufacture. Some, like coffee and tea, increase alertness. Others, like alcohol and opiates, decrease it. Psychiatric drugs affect mood, psychedelics alter reality. We alter our brain chemistry for all kinds of reasons, using substances recreationally, socially, medicinally, ritually, because we’re tired, or stressed, or bored, or seeking enlightenment. No other species does anything like it.

So how did it all start?

High on Life in the Pleistocene

Given our love of drugs and alcohol, you might assume that getting high is an ancient tradition, maybe even dating back to our ape-like ancestors in Africa. Some researchers- arguably inspired more by liberal doses of hallucinogens than hard scientific evidence- suggest drugs triggered the evolution of human consciousness. Yet there’s surprisingly little evidence for prehistoric drug use .

Hadzabe hunter, Lake Eyasi, Tanzania (Nick Longrich)

African hunter-gathers- Bushmen, Pygmies, Hadzabe- are probably the people who are closest to the ancestral human cultures. These tribes have a complex plant lore, and know which plants to use for foods, medicine, magic, and poison— and many of these plants are psychoactive.

The sophisticated herbalism of hunter-gatherers implies drug use probably originates with a tradition of herbal medicine and magic, possibly dating back to the earliest Homo sapiens some 200,000-350,000 years ago. But it’s unclear how much African hunters traditionally used drugs.

Boophane distycha is a potent hallucinogen, but was used by Bushmen for arrow poison, not tripping (curiously, Bushmen also discovered the deadly compound ricin as an arrow poison- they had a remarkable knowledge of toxins). The Bushmen do love tobacco, but they learned that vice from Europeans, it’s not something that was originally. part of the culture. Tanzania’s Hadzabe love to toke up during a hunt, as do Aka Pygmies but cannabis is an Asian import. In short, to the extent these tribes use drugs, it’s mostly the result of importing bad habits from other cultures, not part of their heritage.

The most compelling evidence for drugs is use of a potentially hallucinogenic plant, !kaishe, used by Bushmen healers, which supposedly makes people “go mad for a while”. Yet how much Bushmen really used drugs is debated. Yes, it’s possible that the anthropologists studying them have overlooked the role of drugs in their cultures, but if so, that implies they couldn’t have been all that important to these peoples. The implication is that, despite Africa’s diverse plants and fungi, early humans used drugs infrequently, maybe to induce trances during rituals, if at all.

Maybe their lifestyle meant rarely felt the need for escape. Exercise, sunlight, nature, time with friends and family- they’re powerful antidepressants. Drugs are also dangerous; just as you shouldn’t drive drunk, it’s risky to get high when lions lurk in the bush, or a hostile tribe waits one valley over.

Out of It in Africa

Migrating out of Africa 100,000 years ago, humans explored new lands, experimented with new ways of life, and new substances. People discovered opium poppies in the Mediterranean, cannabis and tea in Asia.

Map showing the origins of various plant- and fungus-derived drugs (Nick Longrich, w/photos from Wikipedia)

Opium was used by 5,700 BC in Europe. Cannabis seeds appear in archaeological digs at 8,100 BC in Asia, and the historian Herodotus reported Scythians getting high on weed in 450 BC. Tea was brewed in China by 100 BC. What’s striking here is that the earliest evidence for the use of these substances by Homo sapiens is surprisingly late in human history.

It’s conceivable our ancestors experimented with substances before the archaeology suggests; stones and pottery preserve well, drugs don’t. For all we know, maybe the Neanderthals were the first to smoke cannabis. But archaeology suggests that the discovery and intensive use of psychoactive substances mostly happened late, only after the Neolithic Revolution, 10,000 BC- when we invented farming, herding and civilization.

The curious implication of this observation is that something about civilization itself promoted drug use.

Beringia and the Amerindian Psychonauts

35,000 years ago, hunters trekked across the Bering Land Bridge into Alaska, then headed south. The Americas offered a chemical cornucopia. Here, Amerindians discovered tobacco, coca, maté. But for some reason, indigenous Americans were especially fascinated with psychedelics.

American psychedelics included peyote cactus, San Pedro cactus, morning-glory, Datura, Salvia, Anadenanthera, Ayahuasca, and over 20 species of magic mushrooms. It was a Precolombian Burning Man.

Indians also invented nasal administration of tobacco and hallucinogens. Europeans then adopted the technique: the Indians taught white people to snort drugs.

Mixtec Codex Mexicanus, depicting gods and the ceremonial uses of magic mushrooms

This American psychedelic culture is ancient. Peyote buttons are carbon-dated to 4,000 BC, Mexican mushroom statues hint at Psilocybe use in 500 BC, a 1,000 year old stash from Bolivia contains cocaine, Anadenanthera, and ayahuasca (and must’ve been one hell of a trip). Californian caves preserve paintings of Datura, and the plant,from 400 years ago.

Aztecs and other American peoples used hallucinogenic Peyote cactus, Lophophora williamsii (Wikipedia)

Psychedelic use was especially well developed among Mexico’s Mayans, Olmecs, Mixtecs, and Aztecs. Spanish conquistadores were horrified by Aztec drug trips, which used mushrooms, morning-glory, and peyote; they saw it as the Devil’s work.

Psychedelics must have had a profound influence on the cultural evolution of these societies. Consider the sheer, bloody weirdness of Aztec religion - the human sacrifices, skull-towers, slaves made into skin-suits, all to feed the bloodlust of the sun-god Huitzilipochtli and forestall the end-times… maybe it had something to do with all that peyote and shrooms.

Consider the massive changes that psychedelics wrought on Western culture. In the 1950s and 1960s, the rediscovery of the traditional Mexican use of the Peyote cactus and Psilocybe mushrooms, led by people like Beat poet Alan Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Bob Dylan and Timothy “Turn On, Tune in, Drop Out” Leary, radically reshaped Western culture. It kicked off the 1960s psychedelic craze, creating modern drug culture and fundamentally changing everything from popular music to science fiction to politics.

A striking pattern emerges here. As with the Old World, substance use seems to track civilization’s rise. Hunter-gatherers used tobacco and hallucinogens; but coca use became common alongside farming, and the most elaborate drug traditions evolved in city-states and empires.

Alcohol, cause of, and solution to, all life’s problems

The next step in the evolution of debauchery- and the origin of countless nights out, pubcrawls, bad decisions, and walks of shame- was agriculture.

That’s because farming made booze possible.

Dionysius (Bacchus to the Romans), the Greek god of wine and ritual madness

When people settled and cultivated grains, fruits, and roots, farming created a surplus of sugars and starches. Mashed and left to ferment, yeast magically transformed carbohydrates into potent brews.

People invented alcohol many times independently. The oldest booze dates to 7,000 BC, in China. Wine was fermented in the Caucasus in 6,000 BC; Sumerians brewed beer in 3000 BC. In the Americas, Aztecs made a beer called pulque from the same agaves used today for tequila; Incas brewed chicha, a corn beer.

Curiously, alcohol was often used as a form of payment- workers in Sumeria and Egypt were paid in beer, Incan workers were paid in chicha. It seems to have been a way of getting people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t have wanted to do, like building pyramids— or going war.

Wine was part of the supplies brought into battle by the Ancient Greek phalanx. The Greek hoplites were citizen-soldiers, not professionals, and not highly trained- they didn’t need to be. All they had to do was stand shield-to-shield, point their spears at the enemy, charge- and not break formation. While this didn’t require much skill, it did require courage- and wine may have supplied that courage, with the hoplites going into battle half-drunk on the stuff. Later militaries would follow in this this tradition, with sailors in the Royal Navy provided a daily rum ration, and booze also rationed out to soldiers in WWI.

Alcohol seems to have played a central role in Western civilizations, the way psychedelics did in the Americas. Wine was a key part of Greek and Roman culture, served at Plato’s Symposium and the Last Supper. Although Islam would ban alcohol, wine would become incorporated into the rituals of both the Jewish Passover seder and the Christian ritual of communion.

I wanna be sedated

Substance use goes back millennia, maybe to before Homo sapiens evolved. At least some animals are known to seek out mind-altering chemicals, so it’s unlikely early humans abstained entirely. But historically, drugs are most diverse, their use most intensive, the traditions the most elaborate, in agricultural societies and civilizations, not hunter-gatherers. Why is that?

Maybe as societies grow more complex, everything about them does as well- technology, art, mathematics, mythology, warfare- and use of psychoactive chemicals. It’s also likely alcohol and drugs promote the development of civilizations- alcohol helps break down inhibitions and helps people socialize, altered states can promote creativity, and caffeine makes us productive. Chemically induced changes in perspective likely encourage cultural and technological innovation.

But this pattern suggests another possibility- that something about civilization encourages substance use.

Maybe our ancestor’s lives- hunting kudu and giraffes, gathering roots and baobab fruit, nights around the campfire with friends and family- filled their psychological needs in a way modern societies don’t.

Large societies come with large-scale problems- crop failures, large-scale warfare, plagues, revolutions- against which individuals are relatively powerless. Top-down institutions, where kings, priests, presidents and bosses issue orders, reduce people’s control over much of their lives. Big cities can, ironically, leave people feeling lonely and disconnected. And large societies create huge amounts of wealth and power, but these inevitably concentrate, creating huge inequalities in wealth and power.

Perhaps when people can’t change their circumstances, it’s easier to change their minds. Philosophies, meditation and mythologies offer one way to do that; drugs are another. Marx derided organized religion as the “opiate of the masses”, but another opiate is, well… opiates. Instead of taking up arms against a sea of troubles… just pick up a cold one.

Skull of a skeleton with a burning cigarette, Vincent Van Gogh. (Wikipedia)

Not to say drugs are all bad. A pint with your mates, an edible before a War on Drugs concert, a coffee (or two, or three, or four…) to help with productivity. In moderation, they’re positive. Psychedelics in particular show remarkable potential for depression, anxiety, and trauma. But psychoactive substances can also do a lot of damage. At best, they’re double-edged. To the extent they help us engage with the world, they can be helpful; when we use them to escape it, they’re not.

A glass of wine kindles romance, alcoholism wrecks families. Opioids are powerful painkillers, but also killers. For every writer, artist, and musician who found inspiration in drugs, another is destroyed, and they’re often the same person.

Psychoactive substances are just a tool, like a hand-axe or a smartphone. But like any other technology- nuclear fission, genetic engineering- the more powerful the tool, the more dangerous. The human mind is probably the most powerful tool there is; messing around with its workings is dangerous.

I’d like to end this essay with something insightful and pithy, but I can’t, because it’s a complex problem, and I don’t have easy answers or simple conclusions, neither Just Say No! nor, as Bob Dylan sang, Everybody must get stoned!

I mean, just thinking about it makes me want to grab a drink.

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