It is perhaps the ultimate bong-rip question: Who was like the first human to ever smoke weed? “Despite great interest in ancient cannabis use,” according to archaeologists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and their colleagues, almost everything about the earliest psychoactive uses of this plant remains “poorly understood.”

But some of the best and oldest evidence of ancient humans using cannabis for its mind-expanding properties is now emerging from an 8th-century BCE burial mound in Eastern Scythia, in what’s sometimes called “the Siberian Valley of the Kings.” Excavations of this 2,800-year-old burial mound, named Tunnug 1, have uncovered chemical traces in ancient human hair, as well as seeds, suggesting that cannabis was likely used in funerary rites among the region’s ancient equestrian nomads.

The researchers used mass spectrometry to test samples of braided hair recovered at the site, finding an average cannabinol content of 560 parts per billion (0.56 micrograms per gram) per sample.

“These data add to the growing global repertoire of archaeological evidence for ancient people using plants as mind-altering or mood-altering drugs,” according to archaeologist Timur Sadykov, a chief scientist at the site on behalf of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute for the History of Material Culture, and his coauthors.

“Early cannabis use thus emerges not simply as a pharmacological curiosity but as an indication of how ancient societies experimented with and ritualized the psychoactive qualities of the botanical world.”

Sadykov’s peers and their German colleagues, including archaeologist Gino Caspari from the Max Planck Institute, have been working methodically on the excavation of Tunnug 1’s secrets since at least 2024.

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