Culture & science 2008 🇨🇳 China

Cannabis from a 2,700-year-old grave at Yanghai is shown to have been psychoactive

A study in the Journal of Experimental Botany analysed 789 g of plant matter from a leather basket and a wooden bowl in tomb M90 of the Yanghai cemetery near Turpan, the grave of a man of about 45. Its breakdown products and a THC-synthase gene showed that the plant had been a drug type. The authors suggested medicinal, psychoactive or divinatory use; how it was taken is unknown.^[1]

Science and medicine

In the cultural atlas

TraditionsCannabis in the graves of XinjiangThree cemeteries in western China, 2,800 to 2,400 years old, hold cannabis laid beside the dead, spread over them or burnt at the graveside. They are some of the oldest physical evidence of the plant used for more than fibre and food.

Listed for context. No score change is recorded for China here.

References

Journal of Experimental Botany — Russo et al., Phytochemical and genetic analyses of ancient cannabis from Central Asia (2008)

Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.