Archaeologists have discovered the earliest evidence of tobacco use 12,300 years ago in western North America, providing fresh insights into the cultural roots of a plant that has had more social and economic impacts worldwide than any other psychoactive substance.
A six-member team announced on Monday that it had found four charred seeds of a tobacco family plant among the myriad contents of an ancient hearth in what was once a huntergatherer camp in present day desertland in the western US state of Utah.
Earlier research had already established that humans first domesticated tobacco in North America. But the new findings push back the earliest use of tobacco by over 9,000 years and suggest huntergatherers there used wild tobacco species long before they cultivated tobacco alongside food crops.
Scientists used pieces of wood from the hearth to assign a date to the site between 12,060 and 12,480 years. The site, named Wishbone, is also rich in bones of animals, mainly waterfowl, including several duck species that the researchers believe were cooked at the site.
“The new date tells us that people were already beginning their relationship with tobacco in the Pleistocene Americas,” Daron Duke, principal archaeologist at the Far Western Anthropological Research Group in Henderson, Nevada, told The Telegraph in an email.
“Domestication came later when other factors came into play, but taking advantage of thousands of years of knowledge by earlier indigenous people,” he said.
The researchers published their findings in the research journal Nature Human Behaviour on Monday.
Researchers believe people first entered the Americas through the Bering land bridge linking Siberia to Alaska between 25,000 and 16,000 years ago to expand across North and South America.
Three years ago, anthropologist Stephen Carmody at the Troy University in Alabama and his colleagues reported finding nicotine residues in an ancient pipe at a site called Flint River in southeastern US, implying tobacco smoking around 3,300 years ago.
Archaeological and historical accounts have long established that European settlers learnt about tobacco use across South and North America and carried tobacco to the rest of the world.
The Portuguese brought tobacco into India in 1605 and seven species of Nicotiana were brought from North America to the Calcutta Botanical Gardens in 1814, according to records maintained by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research. And a model farm for tobacco emerged in Pusa, Bihar, in 1875.
The Wishbone site, first excavated by Duke and his colleagues in 2015, currently lies in the Utah desert but was part of a vast wet marshland 12,300 years ago and favourable for huntergatherers, evident from over 2,000 bone fragments around the hearth.
The research suggests that tobacco grew naturally in the region but no nearer than 13km from the Wishbone site. Tobacco requires dry conditions, but the site was surrounded by wet marshland.
“People had to have brought the tobacco to the site. They were mobile, so they likely carried tobacco with them as they moved through the landscape,” Duke said.
The archaeological studies do not reveal the manner in which the tobacco was used. But, the researchers believe their findings suggest that tobacco was used as a “fireside activity along with food preparation, food consumption, and tool use”.
