Cannabis was one of the first crops that humans cultivated about 12,000 years ago. But medicinal and psychoactive uses are much more recent.
It’s the kind of question that might be raised in a smoky room, as the asker flicks back the wheel on a lighter, about to hold the flame to a joint: Where did weed even come from? Not the marijuana dispensary down the street orthat guy your cousin goes to – but long, long before that?
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| Cannabis sativa is one of two main varieties smoked today. It diverged from cannabis indica more than 1 million years ago Bildagentur-online/Getty Images |
Pinning down precisely when cannabis evolved is tricky business because the plant’s iconic leaves have left very few fossilised impressions over the past several millennia. Scientists have had to piece together pot’s origin story using traces of its seeds and pollen frozen in time in the fossil record, as well as genetics that trace its lineage back to ancestral weeds.
Cannabis has some familiar family members. Its cousin Humulus, a flowering genus in the family Cannabaceae, is better known as hops: the climbing plant that gives off a similarly funky smell as marijuana and gives beer its distinctive flavour. Their ancient seeds and leaves have been described for hundreds of years, and at some points the two plants have been mistaken for each other. In 1963, botanist Pavel Ivanovich Dorofeev described and illustrated a fossil seed found in Siberia and assigned it to Humulus, but six years later he identified it as Cannabis, before changing his mind again in 1982 and finally determining that it was an extinct species of Humulus.
Where did marijuana come from?
These cases of mistaken identity led scientists to turn to genetics for answers on just when Cannabis and Humulus may have split from a previous ancestral plant. They used molecular clocks, which enable us to peer back in time by analysing the mutations that DNA accumulates over generations, to determine that Cannabis and Humulus diverged from a common ancestor 27.8 million years ago.
Fossilised pollen found in China suggests this happened on the Tibetan plateau where elevations soar to over 4000 metres. There, on the roof of the world, the very qualities we prize in this calming herb may have been what let the plant flourish. Cannabinoids – the active compounds in cannabis – are also hypothesised to protect plants from the harmful UV rays that make high altitudes inhospitable.
Genetic analysis suggests that the two main kinds of cannabis we smoke today, Cannabis sativa and Cannabis indica, diverged 1.05 million years ago. Back then, Earth was in the middle of the Pleistocene Epoch, Homo habilis was hunting the plains of Africa and tools had been in use for about 1.5 million years. But we haven’t found evidence of stoners in the Stone Age quite yet.
Cannabis was domesticated around 12,000 years ago in East Asia. The early uses of the plant were for rope, cloth, paper and even bowstrings.
Once people began cultivating the plant, it spread like, well, a weed. The Yamnaya people migrated out of the Eurasian steppe and brought cannabis to parts of Europe and the Middle East beginning around 5000 years ago. By around 2000 BC, pot had proliferated across the continent, entering Korea through trade with Chinese farmers, moving into the South Asian subcontinent with Aryan invaders. By this time, it was popular in the Middle East with nomadic equestrians called the Scythians, who then carried it through what is now Russia and Ukraine. Germanic tribes took the plant west, bringing it into Britain with Anglo-Saxon invasions.
By around AD 1400, cannabis had spread into northern Africa, reaching the continent’s southern tip over the next few hundred years. Between 1500 and 1800, it was transported across the Atlantic by European colonists, where it took root and spread across North and South America.
We know that, across most of this time, humans used the versatile plant for things like rope or oil. But when, exactly, did we start to use it for medicinal or psychoactive purposes?
When did humans first use marijuana to get high?
Hard evidence about that is spotty. Cannabis gets a mention in a book of herbal remedies from 2800 BC by Emperor Shen Nung, known as the father of Chinese medicine. More solid evidence turned up in 2019, coming from a cemetery in the Pamir mountains in western China. There, in ancient tombs, researchers found wooden fire pits known as braziers that had traces of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) – the main psychoactive chemical in marijuana – at much higher levels than what is found in typical wild cannabis. The finding suggests that people were inhaling the smoke from especially potent pot by about 2500 years ago.
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| Wooden braziers found in 2019 in 2500-year-old tombs in China’s Xinjiang region had residue from cannabis with high THC levels X. Wu (Institute of Archaeology, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) |
And they weren’t the only ones. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote in the 5th century that those marauding Scythians that spread the plant into Russia and Ukraine had a ritual involving what may be one of the earliest documented cases of hotboxing:
“They set up three poles leaning together to a point and cover these over with woollen mats; then, in the place so enclosed to the best of their power, they make a pit in the centre beneath the poles and the mats and throw red-hot stones into it… The Scythians then take the seed of this hemp and, creeping under the mats, they throw it on the red-hot stones; and, being so thrown, it smoulders and sends forth so much steam that no Greek vapour-bath could surpass it. The Scythians howl in their joy at the vapour-bath.”
Perhaps there really is nothing new under the sun.
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