While betel nuts are still chewed today in many parts of Asia and Oceania, the practice probably began when ancient hunter-gatherers sucked on them for toothaches. Researchers examined teeth from two individuals and found excessive wear from sucking and occasionally gnawing on these hard seeds of the areca palm.
It’s likely that the wear from sucking betel nuts led to more pain and subsequently to frequent use to manage that pain, so these individuals might have been constantly high.
Humans were ingesting psychoactive substances long before the Beatles immortalized tripping on LSD in Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. Beer was first brewed from barley in Israel 13,000 years ago. The hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus and Mescal bean, which comes from the pale purple pods of the mountain laurel, were both being used for ritual and medicinal purposes in Peru and Texas about 10,400 years ago. Peruvians were also chewing coca leaves while peoples in the Sahara were seeing visions from psilocybin mushrooms 8, Humans have used psychoactives and psychedelics for thousands of years, but one drug became a habit even earlier. The highly addictive betel nut (also known as areca) has been a known stimulant in many parts of Asia and Oceania for millennia. Today it’s wrapped in a betel leaf with slaked lime and chewed to intensify its effects, but the earliest users needed no such preparation. When a team of researchers were excavating in a cave on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia, they discovered the molars and jawbone of an ancient hunter-gatherer and found evidence they were sucking on betel seeds between 16,000 and 25,000 years ago. Teeth from an individual at a younger site, from 6,300 to 7.600 years ago, also showed damage from frequently chewing betel nuts.
“We report here skeletal remains of two adult foragers from preagricultural Sulawesi, both of which exhibit a form of dental pathology (rounded, hollowed-out tooth grooves) that has not previously been recognized and formally described in the literature,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances. The oldest dental specimen belonged to a hunter-gatherer who lived during the Late Pleistocene.
This individual is estimated to have been at least 35, though possibly much older, at the time of death, and all that survived are their right maxilla and molars.
It soon became evident that they also suffered from periodontal disease. There was also a pattern of wear on the molars that suggested an object—specifically a hard round object—being stored in the back of the mouth and repeatedly moved from one side to the other. This probably meant it had been sucked on, causing the molars to wear down over time. Further analysis revealed the object had about the same dimensions as a betel nut. The younger individual from the middle Holocene also showed declining oral health, along with tooth loss and wear similar to that of their ancestor. (Yahoo)