2,800-Year-Old Hair From Siberian Tomb Holds Oldest Evidence of Cannabis High

"One does not very often get to drug test a person who has been dead for nearly 3,000 years," Caspari told The Washington Post. "That's even unusual for an archaeologist."

Fair point. But hold on. Not everyone buys the interpretation.

Did people consume it, or did it just touch them?

Volker Auwärter, a forensic toxicologist at the University Medical Center Freiburg, told the Associated Press the analysis "is scientifically weak." His argument: cannabinoids could have contaminated the hair from outside, with no one ever consuming the plant.

Elisa Guerra Doce, an archaeologist at the University of Valladolid, pushed back. The findings indicate, she told AP, that "cannabis was not merely deposited as a funerary offering but was actually consumed by individuals associated with the burial rite."

Two experts. Two readings. The hair preserves the chemicals; it cannot fully preserve the context.

Were people drugged before they died?

Here the story turns darker. A 2024 archaeological study documented the remains of at least 18 horses and one human in elaborate sacrificial deposits at Tunnug 1. Later excavations found more horse remains and scattered human bones. The researchers suspect some ceremonies involved human sacrifice, though definitive evidence remains elusive.

So could cannabis have sedated victims before death? Caspari floated that idea to the Post. But no direct evidence supports it. Nothing.

Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia who was not involved in the study, put it plainly: "The suggestion that cannabis may have been used to calm individuals selected for ritual sacrifice is intriguing, but remains highly speculative," he told New Scientist.

Cannabis might instead have served as ceremonial incense, masked the smell of decomposing bodies, or fed religious experiences around death. The honest answer is that we don't know.

What does this change for the history of drug use?

It moves the confirmed timeline back by about three centuries. In 2019, researchers found chemical evidence of cannabis burning in wooden braziers at the Jirzankal Cemetery in western China, dated to roughly 2,500 years ago. Tunnug 1 pushes that record deeper. And unlike Jirzankal, where cannabinoids survived on objects, the Siberian site preserves traces inside human hair.

There's also an old text that suddenly looks more credible. Around the fifth century BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus described Scythians crawling under felt coverings after funerals and throwing cannabis onto red-hot stones, howling with delight as they inhaled the fumes. Historians spent centuries debating how literally to take that account.

The broader picture now suggests communities in Central Asia knew the plant's psychoactive properties much earlier than previously confirmed. By the time Herodotus wrote his account, the practice may already have carried a long history.

That's the promise of the find. The caveat? Hair chemistry tells us exposure happened — not intent, not purpose, and certainly not pleasure.