Scientists Find THC in 2,800-Year-Old Hair From a Siberian Royal Tomb
A burial mound in Russia's Tyva republic held over 1,400 cannabis seeds — and hair from the tomb's occupants tested positive for THC compounds, the oldest direct evidence of cannabis use ever found.
AUSTIN — It is, in effect, the world's oldest failed drug test. Researchers studying a monumental Scythian burial mound in the Uyuk Valley of southern Siberia report that hair braids from bodies in the tomb's central chamber carry chemical signatures of THC and cannabinol — direct evidence that the people buried there consumed cannabis for its mind-altering effects some 2,800 years ago.
The tomb, dated to the early 8th century BC, is a structure about 460 feet in diameter built from larch logs and clay beneath thousands of tons of stone. The team, led by archaeologist Gino Caspari of the University of Bern and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology, recovered more than 1,400 cannabis seeds associated with the burials. Seeds show a plant was in the room; the hair analysis, published in the journal Science, shows it was in the people.
That distinction is what makes the find exceptional, the researchers say. Plant matter and human soft tissue almost never survive together across nearly three millennia, so claims about ancient drug use usually rest on burned seeds, pipes or residues. Here, the same chemistry used in modern hair testing — the body deposits THC-related compounds into hair as it grows — preserved a direct record of consumption.
The burials were elite: Scythian royals or nobles, laid out with animal-style art and gold, with dozens of horses and likely human attendants sacrificed at the surface — a ceremony matching the 5th-century BC writings of Herodotus, long doubted as travelers' tales. The seeds are now being sequenced; the team says they hold the oldest cannabis DNA known, which could redraw the map of where and how the crop was first domesticated.
