New World Drugs in Old World Mummies? | Hacker News Reader

New World Drugs in Old World Mummies?

ahotcupofjoe.net

43 pointsbenbreen17 comments

An interesting question is that if there were plants containing cocaine in Africa, why were they not cultivated and selectively bred like in South America, and subsequently driven extinct?

Answering my own question, I guess that would possibly by due to the prevalence of coffee. Coca leaves on their own are about as stimulating as caffeine.

The main advantage that Coca leaves (and hence cocaine) have over Coffee beans and caffeine is that large doses of cocaine don't cause the same negative effects as large doses of caffeine. You can rack lines of caffeine like coke, and they do wire you up, but the anxiety and nausea makes it really not worth it.

cocaine is cardiotoxic, that's a fairly negative effect. serotonin receptors aren't only located in the brain... that's a point which should be considered when evaluating the safety of a psychoactive substance.

It is also used for altitude sickness, maybe less of an issue in Africa with less high altitude mountain areas than South America.

> You can rack lines of caffeine like coke, and they do wire you up, but the anxiety and nausea makes it really not worth it.

A teaspoon of caffeine will kill most people, like it did this young man a week or so ago: https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/man...

Extremely high doses of caffeine are deeply and profoundly unpleasant. The way it makes your head spin and your heart pound make you feel inches away from death, which supposedly you are.

Maybe not an extreme dose but I used to take those pre-workout drinks in college. They contain an enormous amount of caffeine. I would “overdose” if I wasn’t careful and have to go into a dark room for a while. Heat pounding, head racing, and very unpleasant am I gonna die feeling.

The time it happened to me, I though it would be clever to make instant coffee using something like 15x as many scoops. It was not clever.

The Romans had a widely used spice that went extinct. We only have textual descriptions. It couldn't be transplanted and local people had an interest in having sheep, which ate it.

There are probably interesting plants vanishing in ecosystem destruction at a quicker rate right now than in the last ten thousand years.

that's laser, or silphium

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium

Even a replacement is unnecessary — silphium was a commercially important plant traded in antiquity. It had well known uses in antiquity, was sought after (considered worth its weight in silver), was mentioned in literature of all sorts and appeared on coins. It’s also potentially where we get the heart symbol and its connotations in modern times (it is theorized to have been a contraceptive of some sort).

And it went extinct, and a we’re not quite sure why. Plants can be very useful and not survive attempts at cultivation before going extinct in the wild. It doesn’t need to get more complicated than that.

I didn't know that caffeine was worse than cocaine in this regard.

Differences in adoption could also be related to the fact that coca leaves can be simply chewed, while coffee beans need to be "processed" to extract coffee.

Here's a great comment on r/askhistorians about this topic: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4t6htu/was_t...

In summary, the preponderance of evidence (and lack thereof) strongly indicates that the presence of these New World drugs in Egyptian mummies is the result of contamination in museum and other contexts from the last two centuries. The chemical analyses are hardly smoking guns, and the complete lack of any other evidence for such exchange across the hemispheres (or in any goods other than coca and tobacco) means that trade is a fairly preposterous explanation for the presence of these drug compounds on the mummies.

So the explanation is that people were doing lines off of these mummies and severed heads?

Many antiquities like mummies were (are?) commonly smuggled. The connection seems an easy one. But I enjoy your hypothesis.

Re: the points about the Egyptians neither having boats suited for cross-Atlantic travel nor bragging about traveling across the Atlantic: could they not have traded with someone else who did have the means to reach the Americas? Or perhaps who in turn traded with someone else who had that access?

The Madagascar origin doesn't make sense since the island wasn't settled until 500 CE (intersting fact: and that too was by Austronesians. Africans didn't settle Madagascar until later)

This is my new favorite site. With so much of this stuff it's hard to find real info outside of the insular circle of crazies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com