The cannabis was found in a grave in China
It’s one thing to find a tomb of a blond, middle-aged Caucasian man dating back thousands of years in China and something completely different to find a cannabis stash in the grave alongside the remains. It’s even more remarkable that the stash was still in good shape, but all three of these are being reported out of an archeological dig in the Yanghai tombs in northern China.
The working theory is that the man may have been a Jushi Kingdom Shaman from around the Turpan basin area. Archeologists found 789 grams of flower together with religious artifacts and personal effects that are consistent with the Jushi belief of the transference from this life to the afterlife.
When tested, the cannabis was found to be 2,700 years old and it wasn’t even thought to be cannabis at first. At first inspection, many thought it was coriander, since the cannabis had lost its odor, but a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Botany was able to figure out that there was a considerable amount of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and that the stash was exclusively female.
It’s already known that marijuana has been used in cultures around the world for the past 10,000 years. It wasn’t until the early part of the 20th century that it suddenly became taboo, for reasons that have still not been made clear. The multitude of examples of marijuana use over the past ten millennia shows that our ancestors had more knowledge about the plant than modern scientists have uncovered until the past 20 years or so.
