🌅 The Earliest Evidence of Habitual Drug Use

SOURCE

Brumm et al. (2026)

WHAT TO KNOW

• A new study by researchers at Griffith University in Australia documents the earliest-known evidence of habitual drug use in humans: distinctive grooves in the teeth of two ice age hunter-gathers who sucked on betel nuts likely to soothe the pain of toothaches. Along with the grooves, the researchers found traces of arecoline—the psychoactive compound in betel nuts—in both individuals’ dental tissue, suggesting they likely sucked on betel nuts almost continuously throughout their lives. The habit also caused significant damage and dental disease, potentially increasing the individuals’ dependence on the nuts’ numbing properties.

WHY IT MATTERS

• The skeletons were found on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, with the older of the pair living sometime between 25,000 to 16,000 years ago. The age of the skeletons suggests sucking on betel nuts could be the world’s earliest-known addictive behavior, and pushes back the timeline for the history of human drug use by around 12,000 years. Prior to the present study, a common theory held that widespread psychoactive drug use emerged only after the spread of agriculture during the Neolithic period, with the earliest-known evidence being traces of barely beer brewed in Israel around 13,000 years ago.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• The researchers say the distinctive grooves found in the individuals’ teeth establish a new bioarchaeological marker—physical signs on human remains that reveal information about a person’s life—for sucking on betel nuts. Other known examples include common markers like dental cavities and broken bones, and less common markers like the bony growths inside the ear canals of people repeatedly exposed to and submerged under cold water, better known as “surfer’s ear.”