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New research reveals people were getting high on cannabis 2,800 years ago. The proof was hiding in the hair of the dead in a Siberian royal tomb. Experts believe it was given to people to calm them before being sacrificed. The tomb sits at a site called Tunnug in southern Siberia's Uyuk Valley, sometimes nicknamed the Valley of the Kings. It was built around 800 BC by early Scythians, horse-riding nomads who buried their elite under huge mounds. Inside four wooden burial structures, a team led by Gino Caspari of the University of Bern found more than 1,000 whole cannabis seeds and about 500 broken ones, carbon-dated to between 800 and 760 BC. Then they tested hair from the people buried there, and every sample held cannabinol, a compound that forms when THC breaks down, along with weaker traces of THC itself. Since THC is what gets you high, that means these people actually consumed it, rather than just having the plant nearby. The findings, published in Science, beat the previous record, from a Chinese cemetery dated to around 500 BC, by roughly three centuries. They also back up the Greek historian Herodotus, who wrote around the 5th century BC that Scythians threw hemp seeds onto hot stones and howled with joy in the smoke. The tomb was surrounded by sacrificed horses, laid out like a ghostly cavalry, and the researchers think people were probably sacrificed there too. They suggest the cannabis may have been used to calm those chosen for the ritual. That said, the team can't tell how the cannabis was taken, whether it was smoked, eaten, brewed or breathed in, or how much anyone had. And the idea that it sedated sacrifice victims is still their best guess, not a proven fact. Next, they're sequencing the ancient plant remains to learn whether the Scythians were growing cannabis or gathering it wild, which could reveal how the plant spread across Asia. source: Caspari, G., Sadykov, T., Formicheva, D., Blochin, J., Armbruster, D., Happel, O., Ryabogina, N., Boxleitner, K., & Spengler, R. (2026). Direct evidence for psychoactive cannabis use 2800 years ago. Science.

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