Researchers found a way to „make the invisible visible,“ revealing an ancient drug practice.
Long before Ethiopian monks in the 9th century discovered that coffee tree fruit helped them stay awake during evening prayer (according to legend, anyway), communities in Southeast Asia have been chewing betel nuts—the seeds of the areca palm and a stimulant that heightens people’s alertness, energy, euphoria, and relaxation—since antiquity. But new research indicates that betel nut chewing has been practiced for even longer.
By studying ancient dental plaque from Bronze Age individuals in Thailand, an international team of researchers suggests that people were consuming the stimulant 4,000 years ago. This novel approach paves the way for future investigations of ancient behaviors in the absence of traditional archaeological evidence.
“We identified plant derivatives in dental calculus from a 4,000-year-old burial at Nong Ratchawat, Thailand,” Piyawit Moonkham, an anthropological archaeologist at Chiang Mai University and first author of the study published yesterday in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, said in a statement. Dental calculus, also called tartar, is hardened dental plaque. “This is the earliest direct biomolecular evidence of betel nut use in south-east Asia.
