A examine printed on April 6, 2023, analysing hair specimens from Es Càrritx, a cave in Menorca, in the Balearic Islands of Spain, has revealed potential recreational drug use in the course of the late Bronze Age, the oldest document of this exercise in the Western Mediterranean area.
Scientists from Spain and Chile discovered hair strands in a single funerary website in Menorca and analysed them utilizing a sophisticated method that identifies the pattern’s composition. The results of the analyses confirmed that the native communities of the Western Mediterranean island had been utilizing alkaloid-bearing crops by the start of the primary millennium BC.
Researchers have already discovered proof of human consumption of plant-based hallucinogens, psychoactive substances and many others. in prehistoric occasions. Opium alkaloids have been detected in Late Bronze Age containers in the Eastern Mediterranean, whereas hallucinogenic compounds have been documented in pre-hispanic artefacts from the Americas. Psychoactive compounds of hashish have been discovered in wood braziers from China.
The new discovery of human hair from the Late Bronze Age in the Western Mediterranean gives scientists a chance to review its alkaloid content material from as many as 3,000 years in the past.
Speleologists Pere Arnau and Josep Márquez found the Es Càrritx website in 1995. Es Càrritx is in the Algendar ravine and is among the most necessary Late Bronze Age websites on the island. According to the examine, it’s a sort of cave that started showing as a funerary construction – whose entrance was closed with the identical sort of cyclopean partitions as used to construct home boat-shaped habitational buildings – round 1450 BC.
The examine signifies that the hair of the deceased had been handled in an analogous manner on the Es Càrritx cave in addition to different burial websites in Menorca. The strands of hair the researchers discovered had been deliberately dyed on the website, presumably by different group members. Some locks of hair had been preserved in tubular wood or antler containers.
Their evaluation indicated the presence of the psychoactive plant species Datura stramonium, Hyoscyamus albus and Mandragora autumnalis in the hair. These compounds comprise atropine and scopolamine. Researchers additionally discovered indicators of Ephedra fragilis, which comprises ephedrine.
Ephedrine and scopolamine had been registered at greater concentrations. Ephedrine’s foremost impact is as a stimulant, whereas scopolamine and atropine are each hallucinogenic.
According to the researchers, the Menorca individuals of the late Bronze Age will need to have had extremely specialised data and ability to have the ability to imbibe these substances with out seemingly poisoning themselves.
From the Science Pages
Question Corner
How quick can ice sheets retreat? Read the reply right here.
