More than 40 tombs dot the southeastern corner of the Pamir plateau, a desert landscape at nearly 10,000 feet elevation in far western China’s high mountains. Buried with the dead is evidence that whoever put them there also conducted rituals at the site more than two millennia ago. And those ceremonies involved a certain hallucinogenic plant we know quite well today: cannabis.
The find is some of the earliest evidence for smoking pot, an international team of scientists announce Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The plants likely contained high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana. The evidence comes from traces of marijuana in wooden bowls also containing burnt stones found at the site.
