Ancient Greek Pill-Poppers Dosed Themselves With Carrots and Yarrow

Pill-popping ancients liked a good dose of vegetables, archaeobotanists have found after analyzing plant DNA in Greek-made pills from a 130 BC shipwreck. Though archaeologists have known about the ship since the 1980s, this is the first time researchers have had a crack at analyzing the drugs found onboard. Using the GenBank genetic database as their guide, they have found that the pills appear to contain carrot, parsley, radish, alfalfa, chestnut, celery, wild onion, yarrow, oak, and cabbage. Geneticist Robert Fleischer of the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park says that many of the ingredients match those described in ancient texts, New Scientist reports. Yarrow was meant to slow blood coming from a wound, and carrot--as described by Pedanius Dioscorides, a pharmacologist in Rome--was thought to ward off reptiles and aid in conception. Fleischer and colleagues presented these first results yesterday at the Fourth International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology in Denmark, and ...