People were using psychedelic drugs in Bronze Age Europe, study finds

People have been using mind-altering substances for a long time.

While archaeologists and historians have long suspected that people in Bronze Age Europe consumed psychoactive drugs, they now have solid scientific evidence to back it up.

And it’s all thanks to a few small strands of human hair found intact at a 3,000-year-old burial site in Spain.

The feathers, the researchers found, contained traces of three different alkaloid substances known to cause changes in consciousness.

“It’s amazing,” said Rafael Mico, professor of archeology pre-history at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. As it happens hosted by Nil Köksal. “This is the first direct evidence in Europe of consumption [of psychedelic drugs].”

Mico co-authored a new study describing the findings, which was published this month in the journal Scientific Reports.

A new analysis of decades of discovery

It’s a discovery, Mico said, that has been decades in the making.

It started in the mid-90s, with the discovery of a sealed grotto in Minorca, an island off the east coast of Spain. The cave, called Es Càrritx, contains the remains of around 200 Bronze Age people.

Some of them, Mico said, had their hair dyed red. A lock of her hair was found inside a tubular box made of wood and antler.

The archeological findings inside the grotto are well preserved, as the opening of the cave has long been covered by collapsed ruins.

“It’s a miracle to be able to recover this strand of hair because it’s a very unique situation,” Mico said.

Preliminary analysis of the hair samples did not teach the researchers anything, Mico said. But over time, the science improved – so they tried again.

And this time, he found evidence of three compounds that can be produced from native plants – the hallucinogens atropine and scopolamine, and the stimulant ephedrine.

All three are used in modern medicine for different purposes, including atropine to combat nerve agent poisoning, scopolamine to treat motion sickness and ephedrine to lower blood pressure during anesthesia.

The analysis showed that the person with the hair would have consumed the psychoactive compound regularly for at least a year before his death.

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This is not the first clue used by the Bronze Age people of what is now Europe – as it was by people in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

But previous research is more circumstantial – for example, the archaeological discovery of what appears to be a smoking pipe.

“This is why archeology remains so good [is] important to allow future analysis,” Mico said.

What are they used for?

There’s no way to know exactly how these ancient cultures used mind-altering drugs, but Mico says the evidence is very different from how we use psychedelics today.

“In our society, we take drugs that we can probably get away with, forgetting some disgusting situations or embarrassing situations. But we think that in the past, in Minorca, these drugs were only used by certain individuals to do this … role certain social,” he said.

“Our hypothesis is that these people are healers.”

The shaman, says Mico, will act as an “intermediary” between everyday life and “other perceptions, other states of mind.”

University of Saskatchewan medical historian Erika Dyck, who was not involved in the study, has long studied the history of psychedelic drugs.

He says there is ample evidence of use throughout history in societies around the world, including ancient Egypt and China, and various Indigenous cultures before contact.

But he says the modern framework for understanding drugs — with clear delineations between medicinal, recreational and spiritual use — tends to fall short.

“There are methods that are now called psychedelic plants used to try to reach different depths of knowledge. And it can be considered like philosophical knowledge. It can be spiritual knowledge. It can even be political,” he said.

“It might be considered recreational, but it’s also designed to help people gain insight into the various aspects of nature.”

Dyck says studies like this are important, and modern researchers trying to evaluate the risks and rewards of these drugs would do well to look at history.

“There are thousands of years of evidence that humans have used these substances, and there may be other ways to evaluate their effectiveness or their value to society,” he said.

“There are fascinating moments where we can see how psychedelics were valued at different times, and we may not have all the answers right now. regulatory places that, you know, don’t appreciate their long-standing use.”