Wild cannabis ( Cannabis sativa ) may have been raise in Europe long before it was introduced by pastoralists from Asia . Sadly for the European farmers , it likely disappeared before they had the chance to school the crop as the climate changed , which meant the environment was no longer suited for cannabis growth . This is the ending of a new study led by John McPartland from the University of Vermont and published in the journalVegetation story and Archaeobotany .
The study author fall to that actualization after analyzing the remains of ancient pollen from 500 European archeological web site between 8,500 and 1,200 years honest-to-goodness . The presence of what they think are fossilize hemp pollen would suggest there were , in fact , the savage plants on the continent during the Stone Age .
If lawful , this determination contradicts the general consensus , which says the plant evolved somewhere in Central Asia in what is now Mongolia and southerly Siberia . harmonise toa newspaper published in 2014 , the drug was first harvested in Asia thousands of years ago where it was used for medical and spiritual purposes . Since then , it spread through Africa and Europe – Medieval Germans and the Vikings used marijuana to soothe toothaches and numb the pain of childbirth – to the Americas , only arriving in the US at the turn of the 20th century .
The vault investigator have fight with in the past times is the law of similarity between hop pollen and cannabis pollen , which makes it near unimaginable to distinguish between the two . The survey authors claim they have solved this problem , saying the plant grow in very unlike environments . Whereas hop prefer a tender , woodier home ground , ganja enjoys cold , grassy steppes .
Between 10,000 and 7,500 age ago – around the fourth dimension the first granger get in Europe – the land set about to heat up and the environment transition from grassy steppe to woodland . This signify they narrowly lack out on the probability to work marihuana ( which would have already started to disappear ) but were able to get hop instead .
McPartland toldNew Scientist , the pollen records suggest cannabis was n’t farm . After all , “ If it was n’t there they could n’t naturalise it . ”
McPartland ’s is n’t the first subject to point to an alternate history of the drug . In 2016 , researchers from the German Archaeological Institute and the Free University of Berlin publisheda paperthat suggested the drug was being used in Asia and Europe between 11,500 and 10,200 eld ago ( i.e. , much earlier than previously thought ) . This is not to say that prehistorical Europeans were farm the craw for its psychotropic attribute , as the plant hasseveral other usestoo .
So there you have it . If it were n’t for world-wide thaw , we could be a nation of flock smoking carriage – not one of noose sippers and beer guzzler .
[ H / T : New Scientist ]
