SOUTHERN SIBERIA. Scientists have found the earliest direct evidence that people used cannabis for its mind-altering effects, and it comes from drug testing the dead. An international team recovered more than 1,400 cannabis seeds and chemical traces of psychoactive compounds in preserved human hair inside Tunnug 1, a monumental royal tomb in southern Siberia’s Uyuk Valley, pushing the timeline of intentional cannabis use back to roughly 2,800 years ago. The study appeared Thursday in the journal Science.
The dig’s leader, Gino Caspari of the University of Bern and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, put the moment plainly. “It’s only so often as an archaeologist that you do get to drug test a person that’s been dead for almost 3,000 years,” he told the Associated Press. The team from Germany, Russia, Sweden and Switzerland had been excavating the site in Russia’s Republic of Tyva since 2017.
Tunnug 1, also known as Arzhan 0, is one of the earliest monumental tombs of the Scythians, the horse-riding nomads who later dominated the Eurasian steppe. The mound’s wooden burial chambers held high-status individuals. This was royalty. Weapons, horse gear and animal-style ornaments came out of the ground alongside them. The cannabis seeds showed up first. They looked like tiny black spots in the tomb sediment, easy to miss until the team identified them. Radiocarbon dating of six seeds pins them down. Their deposition falls in the first decade of the eighth century BCE, between roughly 800 and 760 BC. The seeds are small and look wild or feral rather than domesticated, and their placement in and around the graves reads as deliberate, not scattered background noise.
The hair closed the case. Mass-spectrometer analysis of preserved strands, including a surviving braid from the central chambers, detected clear signals of cannabinol, or CBN, a stable compound produced when THC oxidizes. Weaker signals consistent with THC itself were present too. “The molecular traces in the hair and the cannabis seeds come from the same grave and suggest that cannabis was used for its intoxicating properties,” Caspari said in statements released with the study. That pairing of plant remains with human tissue from one sealed context is what outside researchers call a smoking gun. “It’s extremely rare that we have both preserved plant parts and human soft tissue with the active compounds in it in the same context,” Caspari told the AP.
The record now reaches back about three centuries further than before. That is a big jump. The previous marker, about 2,500 years ago, came from cannabinoid residues on wooden braziers at the Jirzankal cemetery in the Pamir Mountains of western China, identified in 2019 by a team that included Caspari. People have cultivated cannabis for fiber, oil and seeds for at least 6,000 years, but clear signs of intentional intoxication had stayed scarce. One independent archaeologist, Casper Meyer of Bard College, told Scientific American the find challenges modern assumptions about religion and drugs, and what communal intoxication can be.
The tomb itself is a grim place. Excavations documented the remains of at least 18 sacrificed horses and one human arranged on the mound surface, a layout the excavation team described in a 2024 Antiquity paper as a “spectral cavalcade” echoing rituals the Greek historian Herodotus recorded centuries later. Cannabis may have played a part in those rites. “Since we have dozens of sacrificed horses and some potential human sacrifices it might also have been used to sedate the victims before something bad happened to them, but we cannot prove that,” Caspari told CNN. Whether the plant was inhaled, ingested or both, and in what dose, the analysis cannot say.
Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE, described Scythian purification rites with cannabis seeds thrown on red-hot stones, producing vapor that left participants, in the Loeb translation, howling in joy at the vapor-bath. The Anchorage Daily News notes the new evidence lands roughly four centuries before his account. The full study is published in the journal Science, and the seeds’ state of preservation has let the team begin DNA sequencing on what Caspari calls the oldest known cannabis DNA.
Caspari has framed the find against today’s debates. “There is a lot of speculation about prehistoric use of plant-based drugs, but through this find we are actually able to show that there is a basis to it,” he told CNN. “We think this provides a cultural anchor point for current debates on legalization and medical use of the plant.” Daily marijuana use in the United States has already overtaken smoking and drinking for the first time, and researchers keep pulling ancient surprises from the ground, from a new dinosaur species in Morocco to the first sugar molecule found in space. The steppe, it turns out, was ahead of the curve.
The find has drawn coverage across science desks worldwide this week, including from the Associated Press. What the hair cannot reveal is how it felt. For that sensation, the written record still belongs to Herodotus, describing his howling Scythians two and a half millennia ago.
