The skull of one of the two foragers from Sulawesi, showing the heavy dental wear the researchers attribute to years of holding whole betel nuts in the mouth. Photo Credit: Fakhri
Two people buried on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, roughly ten thousand years apart, have deep rounded grooves worn into their teeth. Nobody had recorded that pattern before. A study published in Science Advances on 9 September argues it comes from holding whole betel nuts in the mouth, day after day, for years.
If the reading holds, it is the earliest evidence anywhere for the habitual use of a mind-altering plant, and it predates farming by a considerable margin.
The work was led by Adam Brumm at Griffith University’s Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution in Brisbane, with biochemical analysis by Carney Matheson.
One died in the depths of the last ice age, the other after it ended
The first is a man who died between the ages of forty and fifty, and who lived somewhere between 25,000 and 16,000 years ago. That spans the Last Glacial Maximum, the coldest stretch of the last ice age, though Sulawesi itself was never under ice.
The second lived between 7,600 and 6,300 years ago and died at a similar age. The sex could not be determined.
Skeletal remains of this period from Sulawesi are rare. These two come from different sites and are separated by around ten thousand years, and they carry the same unusual damage.
