Yes, in some places, and chemistry can now show a few of them. Residues in pottery from Jiahu, an early farming village in central China, point to a fermented drink made as early as the 7th millennium BCE. Hair from the early first millennium BCE, found in a burial cave on the island of Menorca, held plant-derived chemicals that act on the brain. Fire bowls in graves about 2,500 years old, high in the Pamir Mountains, held traces of burned cannabis. Chemistry can’t tell us who used these plants, whether they chose to, what they felt, or what it meant. Claims that “every culture” used mind-altering plants, or that using them is “normal” and “healthy,” go beyond the evidence.
Labels: [Documented] = the evidence shows it directly; [Strongly supported] = strong sources agree; [Plausible] = the evidence allows it but doesn’t prove it; [Disputed] = qualified experts disagree; [Unknown] = the evidence can’t answer.
Why would a plant make a mind-altering chemical?
A psychoactive plant contains chemicals that change how the nervous system works, so they can shift mood, alertness or perception. One evolutionary explanation for many such compounds is defense against animals that eat plants. A 2008 review sums up the argument that many plant chemicals, including nicotine, morphine and cocaine, are nerve poisons that evolved to stop animals from eating the plant (Sullivan, Hagen & Hammerstein, 2008). In one experiment it describes, tobacco plants engineered to make less nicotine lost about three times more leaf to plant-eaters. [Strongly supported for nicotine as a defense] Different plant chemicals can interfere with nearly every step of nerve signaling, not just one “receptor.”
Analogy: a plant’s chemistry works less like a gift and more like a burglar alarm. Why humans seek some alarms out is what the review calls a paradox. The review asks how attraction to some plant chemicals might coexist with their defensive roles; it does not establish one explanation for ancient human choices.
Did other animals get there first?
Alcohol is the clearest example on this page: yeast turns the sugar in ripe fruit into it. In a 2015 study, scientists rebuilt ancient versions of a digestive enzyme called ADH4 from our primate ancestors. The version from about 10 million years ago processed alcohol about 40 times better than the older version before it (Carrigan et al., 2015). [Documented for the lab results] The team links the change to ancestors eating fermenting fruit off the forest floor. [Plausible]
From 1995 to 2012, researchers recorded wild chimpanzees at Bossou, in Guinea, drinking fermented raffia-palm sap by using leaves as sponges. The sap averaged 3.1% alcohol and reached 6.9%, and some chimps “displayed behavioural signs of inebriation” (Hockings et al., 2015). [Documented for this community] The catch: the sap collected in containers local people set up to tap the palms, so these apes were using a human-made opportunity. The paper also cites an older argument that wild primates rarely eat overripe fruit. How often animals get intoxicated in nature: [Disputed]. We found no evidence that most animals use psychoactive plants.
How do you find a plant’s chemistry thousands of years later?
Archaeologists look for four kinds of clues: tools possibly used to prepare or take a plant, such as mortars or pipes; plant remains, such as seeds and pollen; chemical residues in containers; and, rarely, chemicals inside human remains such as hair (Guerra-Doce et al., 2023, Introduction). Each clue climbs only part of a ladder: finding a plant shows it was there, not that people consumed it, why, or what it felt like.
Take the opium poppy. Poppy capsules from La Marmotta, an early farming settlement built on wooden posts (piles) in central Italy, were directly radiocarbon-dated to between about 5620 and 5480 BCE (Salavert et al., 2020). [Documented] The same team notes that the crop offers food, oil from the seeds, and mind-altering latex from the capsules. The remains alone can’t tell us which one the farmers wanted. [Unknown]
Old results can collapse, too. The Menorca and Pamirs teams both flag earlier drug reports that were poorly documented or later refuted (Guerra-Doce et al., 2023; Ren et al., 2019).
What have chemists actually found?
A drink at Jiahu, China. In a 2004 study, a team tested residues in pottery from Jiahu, in Henan province, dated to about 7000–5500 BCE. They reported beeswax compounds (a marker for honey), tartaric acid (found in grapes and in hawthorn fruit), and a carbon signature that fits a plant like rice or grape (McGovern et al., 2004). [Documented for the reported chemistry] They concluded that villagers made a mixed fermented drink of rice, honey and fruit. [Plausible: one team’s reading of the chemistry] Who drank it, how often, and why: [Unknown]
Hair in a Menorca burial cave. Es Càrritx was a burial place until about 800 BCE and held the remains of more than 200 people. In its last centuries, some of the dead had locks of hair dyed or coated red, cut, and sealed in wooden or antler tubes. Hair from one olive-wood tube, dated to the early first millennium BCE, contained ephedrine, atropine and scopolamine (Guerra-Doce et al., 2023). [Documented] The authors suggest possible plant sources, but the chemical result alone does not identify a species. [Unknown: exact source] Because chemicals enter hair as it grows, they estimate the hair records use spread over nearly a year. [Plausible] Whose hair it was is unclear. The cave held no remains of these plants, and the authors conclude they were not part of the burial rite itself. They raise medicine, or ceremonies led by specialists they call shamans, as possibilities, and pose the ritual link as a question. [Unknown: purpose]
Smoke in graves in the Pamirs. At Jirzankal Cemetery, about 3,000 meters up in the eastern Pamir Mountains of western China and used about 2,600–2,400 years ago, excavators found ten wooden braziers (fire bowls). Chemists detected CBN, a breakdown product of THC (the main mind-altering chemical in cannabis), inside nine of them and on two of four stones, but not on their outer surfaces (Ren et al., 2019). [Documented] The team concludes that cannabis was burned on hot stones during burials, and that the plants carried more THC than most wild cannabis, perhaps because people chose or bred stronger plants, or because high-mountain conditions raised THC. [Plausible] They suggest the smoke may have been aimed at “communicating with the divine or the deceased.” [Plausible at most; the meaning is Unknown]
What did a Greek writer say?
In the fifth century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus described hemp vapor in a Scythian custom associated with the period after a burial (Histories 4.73–75, trans. G. C. Macaulay). [Documented for his account] He described a people not his own. Ren and colleagues distinguish that account from evidence of burning during burials at Jirzankal. A written description elsewhere cannot supply the missing meaning of the cemetery’s objects.
Was soma a mushroom?
Soma is a drink named in the hymns of the Rigveda, and scholars have tried to identify the plant behind it since the late 1700s (Shah, 2015, pp. 26–27). This page does not reconstruct the ceremony or offer an identification as settled.
In 1968, R. Gordon Wasson (1898–1986), a J.P. Morgan vice president who also studied mushrooms in human culture (Binghamton University Libraries), argued in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality that soma was the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria. N. C. Shah’s 2015 article lists competing candidates but itself favors Wasson’s mushroom hypothesis. It also acknowledges uncertainty about the drink’s ingredients (Shah, 2015). [Disputed]
One soma lead shows how claims travel. The archaeologist Sarianidi reported ephedra, poppy and cannabis in vessels at Gonur, in Turkmenistan. Ren and colleagues report that specialists re-examined the pottery and found impressions of millet grains, not cannabis or ephedra (Ren et al., 2019, Discussion). Shah’s 2015 article still repeats the original claim (Shah, 2015).
Did William James study mind-altering plants?
The two books checked here discuss changes in consciousness, not the archaeology of plant use. In his 1890 Principles of Psychology, the psychologist William James (1842–1910) uses alcohol, opium and hashish as examples of substances that change the mind by reaching the brain (vol. 1, ch. I). In 1902, writing about alcohol and nitrous oxide, he argued that waking consciousness “is but one special type of consciousness,” while calling alcohol overall “so degrading a poisoning” (Varieties of Religious Experience, Lectures XVI–XVII). [Documented for what James wrote] Neither book studies ancient plant use.
How we know
What evidence exists: residues in pots and fire bowls, directly dated plant remains, drug chemicals in one set of ancient hair, ancient enzymes rebuilt in a lab, field records of wild chimpanzees, a Greek historian’s account of outsiders, and a hymn tradition that scholars have combed for botany.
Whose voices are missing: everyone who used these plants. No one at Jiahu, Es Càrritx or Jirzankal left words. The search for soma’s identity includes Wasson’s proposal and Indian researchers too (Shah, 2015, p. 27), but no source here records how today’s keepers of the chanting tradition view that search.
How power shaped the record: mind-altering substances are “usually invisible” to archaeology, the Menorca team notes. What survives takes luck: a sealed tube deep in a cave, residue soaked into pottery, a high mountain grave. [Plausible] The famous cases come from sites someone chose to dig, fund and test. The Menorca hair was tested, and our sources include no present-day community voice on that. Some of the best-known histories of mind-altering plants belong to Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Telling those histories needs those communities’ own voices and permission, which this page doesn’t have, so it leaves them out on purpose. Africa, Oceania and much of Asia are missing too. That reflects what we checked, not where people used plants.
Then vs. now
- Then (what the evidence shows): in some places, people brewed, consumed or burned plants with mind-altering chemicals, sometimes around burials. Now: we can detect molecules, not meanings. How common this was: [Unknown]
- Then (20th-century theories): Wasson named one mushroom as soma. Now: soma’s identity is still [Disputed].
- A modern claim you may see: mind-altering plants as a “normal, healthy” part of life, or brain “maintenance” like sleep. What we found: no evidence for either. Ancient use says nothing about safety. The Menorca team describes atropine and scopolamine as deliriants that cause extreme confusion, and cites modern cases of datura poisoning. Modern medical research is outside this page.
What we still don’t know
- Whether people used mind-altering plants before farming. Every human case checked here comes from a farming-era or later site. [Unknown]
- Who in a community took part, and whether they chose to. [Unknown]
- What any of it felt like or meant to the people involved. [Unknown]
- What soma was. [Disputed]