A find on the Siberian steppes has rewritten what we knew about how ancient peoples used psychoactive plants.
Beneath a thick crust of frozen earth, an international team of archaeologists has unearthed the oldest directly dated physical evidence of psychoactive cannabis use ever documented.
The study, published in the journal Science and led by archaeologist Gino Caspari, concludes that the nomadic horsemen who inhabited the region 2,800 years ago used cannabis as part of their funerary rituals.
The evidence comes from Tunnug 1, a site in the Uyuk Valley in the Russian republic of Tuva, in southern Siberia.
There, the earliest Scythian communities built a timber-and-stone funerary monument 460 feet across in the ninth century B.C. Permafrost, the layer of subsoil that stays frozen year-round, kept the organic material buried at the site from decaying for nearly three millennia.
Thanks to that natural deep freeze, textiles, scraps of leather, human braids and roughly a thousand cannabis seeds have survived intact.
The Hair Chemistry That Confirmed Scythian Cannabis Use
Suspicions that steppe nomads used this plant go back to antiquity.
In the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus described the Scythians burning seeds on red-hot stones inside closed tents to cleanse themselves after funerals.
Yet for decades, archaeology could offer little more than bronze braziers bearing hemp residue. Whether those present had actually inhaled the smoke remained impossible to prove.
To settle the question, researchers ran human hair found at Tunnug 1 through mass spectrometry. The analysis picked up clear signals of cannabinol (CBN), a compound that forms as tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) breaks down, along with faint traces of THC itself locked in the hair’s keratin.
Because these compounds pass from the bloodstream into hair as it grows, the result shows that these people used cannabis during their lifetimes.
A Thousand Seeds Beside the Main Burial
Alongside the hair samples, excavators uncovered a large plant offering in the mound’s central chamber.
Scattered around the main burial lay dark Cannabis sativa seeds. Direct radiocarbon dating of six of them places the seeds in the early eighth century B.C., a date that fits the monument’s chronology and rules out contamination from later layers.
Finding so many seeds in the grave of a high-ranking person shows how much cannabis mattered in Scythian culture. Geneticists and biologists are now studying the DNA of these ancient seeds, aiming to reconstruct the genetic profile of those early varieties and compare it with the strains grown today.
Ritual and Death in Siberia’s Valley of the Kings
Scholars call the Uyuk Valley the Siberian Valley of the Kings for its dense concentration of kurgans, the great burial mounds of the steppe.
The sheer size of Tunnug 1 and the dozens of horses sacrificed around its perimeter reveal the scale of the ceremonies that marked the burial of the community’s leaders.
Animal sacrifice and psychoactive plants were part of the same worldview. On the steppe, mourners likely used the smoke of these plants to bridge the world of the living and the realm of the dead.
A Milestone for Steppe Archaeology
Fieldwork at Tunnug 1 will continue in the coming seasons, probing the mound’s lower levels and assessing the condition of other bodies still locked in the ice.
The evidence gathered so far places ceremonial use of the plant more than three centuries before Herodotus set down his account.
With chemistry now joining the historian’s toolkit, the biological remains preserved in Siberia’s frozen ground are beginning to speak. They offer rare, detailed glimpses into the lives, customs and beliefs of peoples who roamed Eurasia without leaving a written record of their own.
