Cannabis timeline pushed to 20,000+ years

by Dave Dormer

New research suggests cannabis use may date back 20,000 years or more, far earlier than previously thought.

Most scholars agree cultivation of cannabis began in Asia between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, during the advent of farming following the last ice age. But a 2023 morphometric study of ancient cannabis seeds suggests it may have begun far earlier — 20,000 years ago or more — in what is now Western China and the Tibetan Plateau.

The study looked at the size of seeds, which began to change as people started using them thousands of years ago.

People have been living in the Tibetan Plateau for up to 38,000 years, and in Central Asia for up to 50,000 years, so it is plausible cannabis has been used up to that long.

Cannabis has been around for millions of years, and the oldest plant material discovered so far is seeds dated to 8000 BC, found in Okinoshima, Japan at a neolithic site linked to the Jomon people. The seeds were likely used as food and to make oil.

Pottery found at an ancient archaeological site in Taiwan and dated to the same period, around 8000 BC, has impressions made with hemp cord, meaning cannabis was used widely across Asia by that time.

Along with using it as a source of food, the 2023 study suggests that by 6000 BC, cannabis was being cultivated for its fibre — what we now call hemp. It was around 3000BC that people began selecting cannabis for its trichomes, which contain the medicinal and psychoactive compounds.

Those findings align with a 2021 genomic study that also places domestication around 10000 BC, with a slightly different timeline — hemp selection beginning around 4000 BC, and medicinal/psychoactive use emerging around 3000 BC. Cannabis also appears to have reached the Indian subcontinent from China around that time.

“The first users were probably nomadic peoples,” explains Barney Warf, a professor of geography at the University of Kansas. “We know this from burial mounds of chieftains.”

Warf authored the 2014 paper High Points: An Historical Geography of Cannabis, which traces the spread and use of cannabis from ancient to modern times.

Several nomadic tribes are thought to have been the main conduit for bringing cannabis from Central Asia into India, the Middle East, Northern Africa and Europe between 4000 BC and 2000 BC, says Warf, along routes that would later become known as the Silk Road.

One possible origin for the word ‘Cannabis’ is the Scythian word, ‘Kanab,’ which itself may have come from the Assyrian word ‘Qunubu’. The Scythians were a nomadic group dated to between 900 BC and 200 BC and the Assyrians were in Mesopotamia between 2000 BC and 600 BC.

The Greek historian, Herodotus, wrote about the Scythians' use of cannabis, that they would build small tents and put the seeds, buds and leaves on hot stones then inhale the smoke and vapour, which he said caused them great delight.

In many ancient cultures, cannabis was tied to religion. 

In Hinduism, it is associated with the god Shiva. Called by its Sanskrit name, ‘Ganja,’ which is still used today, cannabis is described in the Vedas as one of the five sacred plants that helps relieve anxiety. The Vedas are ancient Hindu texts believed to have been written between 2000 BC and 1400 BC, making it one of the earliest written references to cannabis.

In China, cannabis may have played a role in early Daoist rituals, which began in the fourth century BC, with seeds being found in imperial tombs.

Some of the oldest cannabis found is believed to have been burned for its psychoactive properties — people inhaling the smoke to get high — is linked to a burial mound found in the Pamir Mountains of Western China, dated to 500BC. Seeds have also been found in burial mounds dated to 3000 BC in other parts of Western China, though it’s less clear whether they were burned as part of a ritual or to be inhaled.

Called ‘Ma,’ cannabis is also referenced in the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, or Divine Farmer’s Book of Herbs, which is linked to the mythical Chinese emperor Shen Nong and dated to around 2700 BC.

Cannabis is also mentioned in ancient Egyptian texts dated to around 1500 BC and cannabis pollen was found on linen wrapping the remains of Ramses II, which is dated to the same time period.  

Its use in Asia was divergent.

In India, cannabis use endured through centuries of religious and cultural practices. It was often consumed as a drink, called Bhang, which saw cannabis resin collected by rubbing the flowering buds, which is then rolled into charas and added to boiled milk, along with herbs. That drink is still consumed today, especially during the spring festival of Holi. Shiva is also known as the Lord of Bhang.

Attitudes were very different in ancient China, Korea and Japan, however, as leaders stamped out the use of cannabis, associating it with Mongols and outsiders.

“China had this long history of fraught relations with these nomads, they were constantly waging war against them,” said Warf.

Cannabis use began to change around the year 1000 AD, especially in the Middle East, becoming what we know today as hashish.

Hash and charas are similar, with charas being made from the resin of a live plant and hash made from dried resin.

It is also important to remember that until smoking was brought to Eurasia from the Americas in the 1500s, cannabis was mainly consumed as an edible for thousands of years.

Today, three main types of cannabis are recognized: Cannabis sativa and Cannabis Indica, which are cultivated for drug use, and cannabis sativa L., which we know as hemp. A fourth, Cannabis ruderalis, is found mainly in southern Russia and has neither strong fibres nor psychoactive compounds.

The name Cannabis sativa L. — sativa is Latin for “farmed” or “cultivated” — was ascribed in 1753 by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus. In 1785, French botanist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck classified the psychoactive variety as Cannabis Indica.

What began as a source of food and fibre evolved into medicine and ritual, and eventually today’s recreational market and medicinal use. Cannabis has help shape cultures around the globe and as research broadens our understanding, it remains a link to the past, reminding us that some of humanity’s oldest habits will always be with us.

The Calgary connection to Bob Marley and the Wailers

by Dave Dormer

Reggae fans can get up close with a piece of music history right here in Calgary.

Housed at Studio Bell, home of the National Music Centre (and viewable inside the King Eddy pub) is the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, which was used to record a number of Bob Marley concerts in the 1970s.

Those include two shows — on July 17 and 18, 1975 — at the famed Lyceum Theatre in London, England, which produced the album Live!, released in December of that same year.

“The story goes that (Island Records founder) Chris Blackwell went to the first night and it was so electric and amazing, he frantically called people to figure out how to record the show for the next two nights,” said Jason Tawkin, a studio and electronics engineer at Studio Bell. “And, that’s when the (Rolling Stones Mobile Studio) was contracted to come in and record those shows, and the rest is history.”

The studio was considered a technological marvel at the time. The first independent outfit in Britain was Olympic Studios, opened in the late 1950s, which became home to some of England’s biggest bands, and helped launch the British Invasion in the mid-1960s.

The interior of the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

Finding it harder and harder to get recording time at Olympic by the mid-60s, the Rolling Stones’ tour manager, Ian Stewart, came up with the idea of recreating the control panel in the back of a bus. So, rather than taking the band to the studio, he could take the studio to the band.

“It’s such a luxury. Now, everyone has a home recording studio but back then they didn’t exist,” said Tawkin.

“That’s kinda the vibe in here, spare no expense, everything is really expensive, custom made, one-of-a-kind. There was over $500,000 worth of microphones. They travelled with 80 microphones so they could capture anything that was happening. It was one of those things where this truck would roll up and capture moments in time.”

Decades later, the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio had been brought to North America and, in 2001, it ended up in Calgary,

The interior of the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

Marley was already famous in the mid-70s, but on that album is the seven-plus minute, live version of No Woman, No Cry, which cemented him as a global superstar.

“That version … more people recognize it than the actual studio version,” said Tawkin.

The original song, which has a quicker-tempo, was released on the 1974 album Natty Dread, and clocked in at three minutes and 46 seconds.

The master tapes from that show, and others by Bob Marley and the Wailers in the 1970s, were discovered in 2013 during renovation work at a northwest London hotel, in an area known as Little Venice.

Badly damaged by water and corrosion, the box of unmixed master tapes was originally tossed in a rubbish bin before someone noticed markings on the outside, which said “Bob Marley and the Wailers” and it was retrieved.

The box was given to Joe Gatt, himself a reggae fan, who enlisted a friend in the music business, Louis Hoover, to see if restoration would be possible.

Reel-to-reel equipment inside the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio.

The pair engaged sound technician Martin Nichols at White House Studios in London, who spent five years painstakingly restoring the tapes, which were to be put up for auction in 2019.

They were expected to fetch upward of $40,000 each, but just before the bidding was set to begin, Island-UGM, who own the recordings, reached out to ask that they be removed, so the two sides could negotiate.

Those talks continue today.

Exactly how the tapes ended up in the hotel basement for several decades has been lost to time.

One of the more popular, and frankly, likely theories, is that a member of the band Black Uhuru and a member of Marley’s entourage had the tapes with them.

After a night of drinking at the hotel bar, the pair offered to leave the tapes as collateral, as they didn’t have any money, never to return. There weren’t ATMs in those days, so it would be plausible the tapes would be left under the guise of having to go to the bank the next morning.

Along with the Lyceum shows, tapes found in the box included recordings of a concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre in 1977 and at the famed Pavilon Baltard, in Paris in 1978.

In a twist of fate, Gatt had been at one of the Lyceum shows in 1975, he told radio presenter Philip Chryssikos during an interview.

Marley died of cancer on May 11, 1981, at a hospital in Florida. He had been undergoing treatment in Germany and was travelling back to his home in Jamaica.

The Discovery of THC

Dr. Raphael Mechoulam

People have been getting stoned off Cannabis for thousands of years, but it’s only been the last half century that we’ve understood why.

It was in 1964 at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel that Dr. Raphael Mechoulam, along with colleagues Dr. Yehiel Gaoni and Dr. Haviv Edery, first isolated delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, which we know as THC.

This began our journey of understanding of the mechanisms behind how and why we get high when we consume decarboxylated Cannabis — which continues today — and led to the discovery of cannabinoid receptors in the human brain and the endocannabinoid system in the human body.

Mechoulam and his colleagues also isolated several more of the 113 cannabinoids that have been found so far, including CBD.

In a 2011 interview with High Times Magazine, Mechoulam said that Cannabis wasn’t well known in the U.S. at the time, mostly being used by jazz musicians. We know this wasn’t entirely accurate, though, as Cannabis was being used in most states and the underground industry was growing.

Because it was illegal in many countries by the 1960s, there was little research being done on the plant. As an organic chemist, Mechoulam was interested in biological activity and it was the lack of knowledge or ongoing research that drew him to Cannabis.

He had asked for a research grant from the American-based National Institute of Health (NIH), which turned him down. But they became interested after Mechoulam managed to isolate 10 grams of THC from hashish.

Despite Cannabis being illegal in Isreal, Mechoulam said they were able to do research as the government understood they weren’t selling it on the side. As we say so often, it was a different time back then.

Why the NIH suddenly got involved is also an interesting story, as told to High Times by Mechoulam:

“Yeah, well, they [NIH] didn’t have a single grant on cannabis at that time, but the National Institute of Mental Health did, I think. As I said earlier, the NIH wrote me that they don’t want to, they won’t give me money, because it’s not interesting or relevant. And then, all of a sudden, I get a phone call from the head of pharmacology at NIH, and they’re now interested. So I asked him: “What happened, all of a sudden, that you have great interest?” Well, it turned out that a senator had called NIH – his son smoked pot, and he wanted to know whether it would destroy his mind!

And just like that, the government got NIH to change direction. They don’t want to fight the senators because they need their support, and they looked around and [said] “Aha!” – they don’t support grants on marijuana, so they asked me if I was still working. We had just isolated THC, and that was it.”

Along with illegality, our lack of knowledge also came from the fact isolating THC was not an easy thing to do, as Mechoulam explained to High Times:

See, morphine and cocaine are so-called alkaloids, namely a natural product that contains a nitrogen [atom] on the molecule, and it can give us salt; it precipitates as a salt. And so you have salt: Cocaine is a salt, morphine is a salt – very easy to prepare. It turned out that THC does not have a nitrogen, and it is present in a mixture of compounds – we know that there are about 60 of them now. And they didn’t have the techniques to isolate them in the past. So a few people tried here and there, actually some very good people – one of them [Lord Alexander Todd] got the Nobel Prize for something else. But they never succeeded in isolating the pure substance, and so they never knew whether they had one compound or many compounds, and so on.

Our understanding of THC has grown since that initial breakthrough. We now know there are CB1 and CB2 receptors in our bodies and brains, and that THC binds to these, giving us euphoric effects.

We also now know that when we smoke Cannabis, it becomes decarboxylated and the delta-9-THC molecules are carried from our lungs to our brains via capillaries. But when we eat decarboxylated Cannabis, our livers break the delta-9-THC molecule down, creating the metabolite 11-OH-THC, which is believed to be one of the reasons why edibles last much longer and are stronger than flower.

Another positive that will come from legalization is the fact it makes research easier to undertake, which will expand our understanding further.

To hear Mechoulam tell the story himself, watch this brilliant documentary:

Where some Cannabis slang comes from

Did you know we call good Cannabis Chronic because of Snoop Dogg‘s confusion as a teenager.

Yes, the Snoop Dogg.

He tells the story to Seth Rogen starting at the 10-minute mark below:

Basically when Snoop and his friends first smoked hydroponic weed, they got so baked they misheard/remembered hydro-ponic as hydro-chronic.

They kept calling it that and eventually used it as the title of Dr. Dre’s first album, The Chronic, in 1992, putting it into the mainstream.

A lot of Cannabis slang has an interesting back story.

Take the term 4:20.

Even your grandma knows what it means when someone says 4:20.

But where does it come from?

Back in 1971, a group of five high schoolers in San Rafael, Calif. got tipped off to an outdoor grow they could harvest if they could find, so they made a code for meeting up and discussing the plan.

“4:20 Louis” they’d say, then meet after classes at the Louis Pasteur statue in front of their school.

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The Louis Pasteur statue in front of San Rafael High School.

They didn’t find the weed but kept using the code to meet and smoke and eventually the ‘Louis’ part got dropped as they’d meet other places too.

One of the group later became a roadie for a member of the Grateful Dead, who was also from San Rafael. They used 4:20 on some of their flyers for shows, which spread it among Deadheads, and eventually it was picked up by High Times in an article about Cannabis slang and terminology, spreading it to the mainstream.

Some Cannabis slang is fairly straight forward.

We call them “dabs” because you dab a concentrate onto heat to take a hit.

Same with the word “concentrates,” THC and other terpenes are concentrated together, making it stronger than smoking regular flower.

Distillates are distilled.

Other words aren’t as straight forward. Take joint for example.

If I ask you to roll a joint, you’d know what I mean, but why do we call it that?

The first use of the word to refer to a Cannabis cigarette was in a 1938 New Yorker article by Meyer Berger titled Tea for a Viper, which also gave us the term roach for the leftover nub of a joint.

Of course, words will be in use long before they’re first written down.

The word joint had been used since the early 1800s to mean a place where nefarious activities happen, like a bar or an opium den.

The roots of that can be traced back to the French word, Joindre, which means to join or bring together (illegal bars and opium dens were usually side rooms joined to the main one).

A blunt is when you use a cigar paper to roll a joint (and they usually have tobacco added). The name comes from New York, where Phillies Blunt cigars were first used, with blunt referring to the size.

Another word with a fuzzy origin is doobie.

Some say it comes from a popular character on the show Romper Room during the 1950s and 60s, Mr. Do Bee. Others would argue it’s linked to the character Dobie Gillis, who was reportedly the inspiration for Shaggy in The Adventures of Scooby Doo.

Maybe it was a combination of both.

And joints are called spliffs in Jamaica and the West Indies. That’s a blending of the word split, which is a rolling paper, and whiff, which refers to the pungent smell of Ganja when it’s smoked.

The earliest uses of cannabis

Cannabis is generally placed into two categories — Sativa and Indica — and to understand the differences between them, we have to go back to the beginning.

The earliest evidence of Cannabis use by humans comes from the Neolithic Age, which began about 12,000 years ago.

Cannabis was one of the first crops farmed by ancient people. In fact. the name Cannabis Sativa is Latin and translates to ‘farmed hemp.’

Neolithic people figured out that not only are the seeds and oil of the Cannabis plant good to eat, but the fibrous stalks can be processed and woven into things like rope, textiles and clothing.

Agriculture was born, which helped create civilization as we know it.

It didn’t take long for the use of Cannabis to spread and advance from the mountains of central Asia throughout the rest of the known world.

Pottery discovered at a site called Yuan-Shan, in modern-day Taiwan, dates to about 8000BC and had woven Hemp cord pressed into it during the drying stage, which could have either been for decoration or a way of labelling that Cannabis/Hemp seeds or oil was stored inside.

Perhaps both.

The oldest textile made from Hemp discovered so far is a piece of cloth from Mesopotamia — modern-day Iraq/Iran — dating to the same period, about 8000BC.

Cannabis originated in the mountains of modern-day Tibet and northern India and was spread throughout modern-day Iran, China, Japan, Taiwan and southern Siberia by ancient settlers and farmers over several thousand years.

The Scythian, nomadic warriors who lived on the steppes of Eurasia starting around 900BC, played an important role in spreading Cannabis throughout modern-day Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Their word for it, Kanab, is also widely considered the origin of the word, Cannabis.

The earliest use of cannabis in what is now China, Japan and Taiwan, was more as a textile, and became what we know as Cannabis Sativa.

The earliest use of cannabis in what is now India, Iran and southern Siberia, was more as a drug, and became what we know as Cannabis Indica.

Today we know both types produce THC and CBD and due to the fact there was only cross-breeding in the black market for nearly a century, it’s mostly hybrids in North America.

• There are actually three types of Cannabis when you add the little-known Ruderalis to the list.

Shen Nong — Sativa

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Some of the earliest written references to Cannabis involve the mythical Emperor Shen Nong, who is said to have lived around 2700BC and is considered the father of Chinese medicine.

Legends say he sampled 365 herbs — including cannabis — to test their effects as a way of teaching people to be self-sufficient. (He is also said to have died from eating a plant that made his intestines rupture before he could take an antidote).

Shen Nong — which means divine farmer — is credited with creating Chinese agriculture by inventing the ox yoke, the plow and the axe, as well as irrigation and the storage of seeds. He is also said to have discovered tea — which he named cha — after leaves from a tree blew into a pot of boiling water, producing a pleasant smell.

Drinking it gave him a warm feeling that also felt as though spirits were exploring his body, so he chose the character cha, which means to examine or investigate.

There’s no physical evidence of Shen Nong’s existence and whether he was an actual person is a matter of debate as the legend also says he was conceived when his mother inhaled the vapour of a dragon and was born with a transparent stomach, allowing him to see the effects of eating herbs.

Our knowledge of Shen Nong comes from writings that date to around 50BC that were based on oral tradition. These were eventually compiled into the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing (some 2000 years after Shen Nong is said to have lived), which translates roughly to: The Divine Farmer's Book of Herbs.

It says seeds from the Cannabis plant — which was called Ma or DaMa — are good for gaining weight and improving blood flow and energy.

But eating too much, Shen Nong warned, “may make one behold ghosts and frenetically run about.”

Cannabis was still mainly used as a textile and food source but burial cairns found in modern-day western China that date to around 2500BC had ash residue that tested positive for THC.

This would be what we know today as Cannabis Sativa.