Archaeologists combined dental wear, biochemical tests, and lab receptor assays to find that prehistoric foragers in Sulawesi sucked betel nuts, moving habitual drug use back into the Ice Age and linking the practice to dental damage and possible pain relief.
Rounded, deep grooves on two ancient Sulawesi teeth match repeated sucking of whole betel nuts.
Arecoline, the betel nut’s psychoactive compound, was detected in dental tissues of the remains.
Lab tests show sucking intact betel nuts can release arecoline in amounts that affect neural receptors.
# What researchers found
# How they linked the wear to betel nut use
# Chemical evidence Biochemical assays led by Associate Professor Carney Matheson detected arecoline inside the dental tissues of the ancient foragers. That chemical signature provides direct evidence that the individuals had consumed betel nut, linking the physical tooth grooves to actual exposure to the nut's active compound.
# Laboratory tests on how sucking releases arecoline To test whether intact nuts could release enough arecoline to affect the brain, researchers soaked betel nuts in artificial saliva and applied the resulting extracts to cloned human receptors expressed in frog egg cells. Those receptor assays showed that sucking on whole nuts can free arecoline in concentrations sufficient to alter neural receptor activity. In other words, the habit shown by the teeth could have produced physiological effects even without the lime-and-quid preparation used today.
# Dates and implications for human behavior The older Sulawesi individual extends probable habitual psychoactive use back into the Late Pleistocene, far earlier than prior estimates that placed common drug traditions in the Neolithic or Bronze Age. The find suggests that at least some hunter-gatherer communities had long-term patterns of drug consumption well before farming.
# Health consequences and possible motivations The study notes that early foragers on Sulawesi had generally poor dental health. Repeated sucking of whole betel nuts likely produced the deep tooth grooves and likely contributed to tooth damage over time. The researchers also raise the possibility that betel nut use could have been adopted partly for pain relief, including toothache, although the chemical evidence establishes consumption without assigning a single motivating factor.
# What this changes about the archaeological record Areca seeds rarely survive archaeologically, so past surveys struggled to trace deep-time betel nut use. Here, durable markers in teeth and preserved biochemical traces provide an alternative pathway to document habitual consumption. The combination of wear patterns and molecular residues creates a stronger case than either line of evidence alone.
# Bottom line
Ancient human remains from Sulawesi suggest people were habitually using the psychoactive betel nut as far back as 25,000 years ago. Researchers found both unusual tooth wear and traces of arecoline, the nut’s mind-altering compound, in the teeth of prehistoric hunter-gatherers. The practice may have started partly as
Image by Fakhri “Scientists Discover the Earliest Evidence of Drug Use in Really Old Teeth” may sound like odd headline language, at least by the traditional standards of the New York Times. But then, the teeth in question are, indeed, really old. “Archaeologists have pushed the timeline of human drug use back further
A hunter-gatherer who lived in Indonesia as early as 25,000 years ago may have regularly sucked on betel nuts to release their psychoactive properties.
Strange, rounded grooves in prehistoric teeth are thought to have been made by regularly sucking whole betel nuts to extract a pain-relieving compound. This marks the earliest known example of probable substance addiction
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