World's Oldest Marijuana Stash Found

jage2 writes "Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana in a tomb in a remote part of China. The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly 'cultivated for psychoactive purposes,' rather than as fibre for clothing, or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany. The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China."

Comments

Well, that certainly explains Idle

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd have to be high to think it was a good addition.

Re:Well, that certainly explains Idle

[zoomshorts]

I WAS high until you killed the buzz. :P

Re:Well, that certainly explains Idle

[Anonymous Coward]

*cough*douchebag*cough*

Summary is wrong

[click2005]

After researchers tested the stash it seemed seemed like 2700 years had passed. In reality it was only 42 minutes.

Re:Summary is wrong

[CaptainPatent]

After researchers tested the stash it seemed seemed like 2700 years had passed. In reality it was only 42 minutes.

Sources also say that after testing the researchers' hands "looked awesome."

Re:Summary is wrong

[LifesABeach]

In the immortal words of Chech, and Chong, "Far Out Man."

Re:Summary is wrong

[QRDeNameland]

overheard circa 700 BC:

Sun Tzu: "Pssst...hey man, it's Sun Tzu, open the door, I got the stuff..."

Chong: "Sun? Sun Tzu? Sun's not here."

Sun Tzu: "No man, I'm Sun!! Now will you open the door, I got the stuff!!"

Chong: "Sun?"

Sun Tzu: "Yes, it's Sun!!!"

Chong: "Sun's not here!!"

-- several iterations later --

Sun Tzu: "It's Sun!!! S-U-N!!! Now will you open the goddamned door?!?!?!"

Chong: "Oh, sure." -- opens door --

Sun Tzu: "What the hell was that about?"

Chong: "Well, you had this note written on the table: 'If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him.'"

Sun Tzu: "Damn, I must've really high when I wrote that..."

Re:Summary is wrong

[neverhadachoice]

hahahh that was great

The researchers

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course the researchers subsequently burned it all... in portions of 5g.

Well there goes my idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA: "Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success."

Re:Well there goes my idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey man, if they can bring back a mammoth, they can bring back a pot plant.

Re:Well there goes my idea...

[operagost]

Maybe they should ask that Birkenstock-wearing guy down the street who's always munching on Cheetos. I bet he knows how to germinate some weed.

Blue eyes?

[Anonymous Coward]

How did they know he had blue eyes? Now, bloodshot, I would understand.

Holy Smoke!

[Foofoobar]

Thought they were going to say 'one toke over the line sweet jesus'. Holy smoke indeed!

ObSimpsons

[Anonymous Coward]

> Sources also say that after testing the researchers' hands "looked awesome."

They call them fingers, but I've never seen them fing.

Oh, wait. There they go.

Bill & Ted?

[kevinroyalty]

So now we know where the blond part of Bill & Ted decided to stay on his last excellent adventure in the phone booth right? :)

Re:Bill & Ted?

[skam240]

And by "blond part" I assume you mean Bill S. Preston Esquire. Jesus... uncultured swine around here.

Re:Bill & Ted?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it wrong to imagine Alex Winter appearing in the (deleted) final scene of Matrix 3, shaking Keanu awake and saying "Dude, you were having a BOGUS nightmare. Did you take one of the red pills last night? You know those always freak you out. Now let's go down to Castro Street and get your cute behind some breakfast."

You have to admit the movie would have been massively better that way.

Uh-huh.

[Chris Burke]

The 18 researchers, most of them based in China, subjected the cannabis to a battery of tests, including carbon dating and genetic analysis. Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success.

The marijuana was found to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, but the sample was too old to determine a precise percentage.

Oh yes, the tests included genetic testing and radio-carbon dating. Good to point that out. I'll just speculate what other tests you could do with 2700 year old weed. On a perhaps related note, since they couldn't use spectroscopy or whatever to determine the precise percentage of THC, I wonder what technique they used to come up with the qualitative measurement "relatively high".

Re:Uh-huh.

[Purity Of Essence]

The 18 researchers, most of them baked in China ...

I'm surprised the editors missed that typo.

Re:Uh-huh.

[forkazoo]

I wonder what technique they used to come up with the qualitative measurement "relatively high".

A highometer was used to run a standard highometric analysis on a scale from "not" to "curiously." On the standard scale, "relatively" is the seventh mark on the indicator.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Anonymous Coward]

You've never heard of bong-hit chromatography?

You're confused, dude. It's bong calorimetry.
You must be thinking of paper chromatography.

Re:Uh-huh.

[Khyber]

Bioassays, perhaps.

You certainly wouldn't be able to tell by smoking it, all the THC would have degraded by then back into precursor cannabinoids. They likely would have measured the amount of residual compounds leftover from broken-down pot.

Re:Uh-huh.

[batquux]

They smoked it and got "relatively high"

Re:Uh-huh.

[cyber_rigger]

The results might have been a fluke.

This probably needs more testing.

Re:Uh-huh.

[geekoid]

The THC count would do that.

I mean, your trying really, really hard to imply they smoked it. Just failing, in an manner Epic.

Re:Uh-huh.

[sgt scrub]

Well at least it is good to know that it could still be "tested" after 2700 years. No worries the stash will go bad now.

In a related anouncement....

[Anonymous Coward]

Keith Richards was greatly relieved it was finally found although he can't recall being in China at the time.

Intersting Tomb Contents

[Sponge Bath]

The tomb also contained bridles, archery equipment and a harp...

The ancient equivalent of car keys, a gun, and an electric guitar.
Considering how much weed there was I say this was
probably an ancient rock star and not a shaman.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[Captain Splendid]

probably an ancient rock star and not a shaman.

Shamans were the rock stars of the day.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It is amusing to note the overwhelmingly strong bias toward "ritual and/or religious" explanations for just about anything we dig up about ancient societies. It makes you wonder what the future will make of us.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[skam240]

I'm pretty sure future societies will at long last recognize our vast numbers of 16 year old shamans.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[QRDeNameland]

Indeed....

That's not a "fertility symbol", it's ur-Porn.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[niktemadur]

Shamans were the rock stars of the day.

Conversely, some rock stars are shaman-like figures for modern times. I'm picturing guys like Jimi Hendrix, Robert Plant, Iggy Pop, Peter Gabriel while in Genesis, David Byrne while in The Talking Heads (particularly in albums such as Remain In Light and Speaking In Tongues), Ian Astbury while in The Cult, Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, most certainly extreme characters like GG Allin, or Wendy O. Williams of The Plasmatics. I'd even go out on a limb and place Freddie Mercury on my list.

Not Bono, though, there's a difference between being a shaman and a preacher, but I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing.
Neither Mick Jagger nor Marilyn Manson, there's too much of the cynical multimillionaire businessmen in them.
Finally, as for an Axl Rose, no supper for you until you finish that album and stop standing up your fans at gigs.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[tommeke100]

more like a hip hop star, apparently he was doing the "Up In Smoke"-tour.
Must be a snoop dogg ancestor.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[myowntrueself]

At the end of "The Golden Bough" there is a piece on comparison between magic, religion and science.

Some quotes:

In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends.

When he discovers his mistake, when he recognises sadly that both the order of nature which he had assumed and the control which he had believed himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he ceases to rely on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself.

Thus in the acuter minds magic is gradually superseded by religion, which explains the succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual beings like man in kind, though vastly superior to him in power.

But as time goes on this explanation in its turn proves to be unsatisfactory. For it assumes that the succession of natural events is not determined by immutable laws, but is to some extent variable and irregular, and this assumption is not borne out by closer observation. On the contrary, the more we scrutinise that succession the more we are struck by the rigid uniformity, the punctual precision with which, wherever we can follow them, the operations of nature are carried on.

Thus the keener minds, still pressing forward to a deeper solution of the mysteries of the universe, come to reject the religious theory of nature as inadequate, and to revert in a measure to the older standpoint of magic by postulating explicitly, what in magic had only been implicitly assumed, to wit, an inflexible regularity in the order of natural events, which, if carefully observed, enables us to foresee their course with certainty and to act accordingly. In short, religion, regarded as an explanation of nature, is displaced by science.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[lawpoop]

But as time goes on this explanation in its turn proves to be unsatisfactory. For it assumes that the succession of natural events is not determined by immutable laws, but is to some extent variable and irregular, and this assumption is not borne out by closer observation. On the contrary, the more we scrutinise that succession the more we are struck by the rigid uniformity, the punctual precision with which, wherever we can follow them, the operations of nature are carried on.

The universe runs on some punctual precision? Sort of like predicting the weather -- oh wait, no. More like quantum mech-- hm. No, not there, either.

In fact, if there's one thing we've learned about the nature of reality through science in the past 100 years, it's that we *don't* live in Newton's clock-work universe. There is no "punctual precision". We live in space-time relativity and quantum uncertainty. Frazier's description of the linear evolution of human thought turns out to be wrong.

Most anthropologists these days consider Frazier's magnum opus to be a product of his time. Everybody uses "magic" alongside mechanical understanding of their world. There is no linear progress. The remotest tribes of the world have extensive natural science knowledge of the life-cycles of the plants and animals they rely on to live. The first thing that a biologist or botanist will do is hook up with a local shaman or hunter ( called a "guide" ) to show him all the plants and animals they know -- this is in addition to their mythical understandings and interactions. ( Check out "Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice" or "Throwim Way Leg" ) Scientifically educated people wash their hands and flush the toilet to avoid invisible germs, but they have no problems handling germ-laden paper money or dish-cloths.

I think that any time you follow rules to interact with forces that aren't directly apparent to the senses, you are essentially practicing magic. Sure, at some point a scientist can go in with an instrument to measure germs or radiation, but the average person "interacting" with those has no way to perceive germs or radiation in an everyday situation. S/He therefore must rely on ritual.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I wholly agree with your characterization of the persistence of the grossest superstition to the present day(in fairness, Frazier described "acuter" and "keener" minds as progressing, which is probably accurate; but they sure as hell haven't managed to drag the rest along with them).

I want to note, though, that probabilistic is not clockwork; but it is not arbitrary. A fair die's outcome cannot be predicted; but its behavior is precisely regular. The old Newtonian dream of a perfectly predictable billiards universe is nonsense; but the probabilistic phenomena around us seem overwhelmingly to be statistically predictable, rather than merely arbitrary.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[Joey Vegetables]

Once upon a time we could not see (much less measure germs). Therefore, by your logic, they must not have existed either.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[maxume]

If Axl Rose burned, would it smell like burning flesh or like burning plastic?

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[geekoid]

It would smell like victory.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[geekoid]

"...the punctual precision with which, wherever we can follow them, the operations of nature are carried on...."

He is referring to repeatability. i.e. falsifiable tests.

Effectively this is the precursor to the scientific method.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[timq]

this was probably an ancient rock star and not a shaman.
I think the difference between the two does not amount to much anyway.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[jgrahn]

Conversely, some rock stars are shaman-like figures for modern times. I'm picturing guys like Jimi Hendrix, Robert Plant, Iggy Pop, Peter Gabriel while in Genesis, David Byrne while in The Talking Heads (particularly in albums such as Remain In Light and Speaking In Tongues), Ian Astbury while in The Cult, Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, most certainly extreme characters like GG Allin, or Wendy O. Williams of The Plasmatics. I'd even go out on a limb and place Freddie Mercury on my list.

But you missed the obvious -- Jim Morrison.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[operagost]

I know this sounds unbelievable, but "Chinese Democracy," which unfortunately does not come with weed, was finally released last month.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[lawpoop]

You misconstrue my logic. Nowhere have I said that imperceptible phenomena does not exist.

What I am saying is that anybody who interacts with something they cannot perceive, be they germs or spirits, is essentially practicing ritual. They have no way of knowing whether or not their actions will bring about the intended results, because they have no way to perceive the phenomenon they purport to influence. How can this be different from a magic ritual?

Now, some rationalist might jump in at this point and say, "But we *can* see germs!" That misses the point. Yes, it is possible to look at germs with a microscope ( though some, like the HIV virus, are still too small to perceive ), but in practicality, that never happens. 99.99% of the time or greater, people perform their germ avoidance ritual without ever perceiving the germs they think they are avoiding. They have no way to judge or measure the efficacy of the actions -- or even if there were any germs in the first place! It's ritual, in the anthropological sense.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[lawpoop]

He is referring to repeatability. i.e. falsifiable tests.

Are you sure? Could you provide a reference, please?

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[lawpoop]

I want to note, though, that probabilistic is not clockwork; but it is not arbitrary. A fair die's outcome cannot be predicted; but its behavior is precisely regular. The old Newtonian dream of a perfectly predictable billiards universe is nonsense; but the probabilistic phenomena around us seem overwhelmingly to be statistically predictable, rather than merely arbitrary.

Yes, but this belies the radical shift that Einsteinian physics and and quantum physics really was in the world of science. No one is claiming that it is arbitrary. It essentially changed the metaphysical foundation that science had been based on since about the time of Newton. Many scientists at the time refused to accept these theories; they still clung to luminiferous aether and clockwork universe theories, until they all died out and the new school took over completely, in about the 1950s.

To say that it was a radical change is not to claim that there is metaphysical anarchy, or complete and utter chaos. But it the change does throw a monkey wrench into the linear progress model that Frazier and other thinkers of his time bought into. It was their cosmology -- slow, steady, incremental progress. Suddenly, Einstein and Bohrs turned that all on its head -- we hadn't made slow and steady progress for centuries. It turned out we were wrong, radically wrong, in our basic assumptions about the nature of the universe and reality, and for a long time, to boot. And the intelligensia didn't accept it until decades had passed.

In this sense, the idea of linear, incremental progress ( and don't kid yourself, they really believed this ) went hand in hand with the clockwork universe. Time marched always forward, just as did human knowledge and understanding, always increasing steadily, never going backwards or having to throw it all out.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[niktemadur]

Thanks for reminding me about Morrison, but I'd pick Arthur Lee of Love over Morrison any day of the week, cases in point:

- When Lee rented an apartment in Venice Beach, a short while later so did Morrison.
- Then Lee got himself a Mustang convertible, and soon enough, Morrison could be seen around town driving one of those.
- Finally, Lee adopted a Rottweiler, and a couple of months later, you guessed it, Morrison got himself one.

Those are the three examples that I know of. When asked if he was annoyed at Morrison for co-opting his thing, Lee smiled and replied that he was mostly flattered.

So there you have it, Arthur Lee was The Man in that particular scenario.

Aw sh*t! I just remembered another guy that belongs on the list, George Clinton of Parliament/Funkadelic. And in spaced-out jazz, there's the one and only Sun Ra.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[niktemadur]

It took longer to release Chinese Democracy than it took NASA to send a human to the Moon from scratch. Or for Voyager 2 to conduct a leisurely tour of our solar system's gas giants. Or for light to travel the distance between Earth and Sirius and back again.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[niktemadur]

My bad, maybe I should have written it thusly:

As for an Axl "No supper for you until you finish an album" Rose, stop standing up your fans at gigs, leaving behind a wake of riots in arenas across the western world.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[horcy]

dude you rock, your comment broad a lot of tears into my keyboard.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[Joey Vegetables]

OK, fair enough. But we really can't perceive most things directly . . only their effects. We do not see objects; we see light reflected off of them. We do not hear explosions, but only the periodic changes in air pressure over time that cause our eardrums to vibrate (unless it's a sci-fi movie and the explosion was in space, in which case we are perceiving the effects of the script writer's imagination, and nothing more). Sometimes we observe effects whose causes cannot be ascertained with certainty, or at least not by the scientific method (observation, experimentation, etc.) We can perceive the effect, but must somehow infer the cause from that effect. To others who do not agree with our inferences, our actions may appear to be "ritual" whereas to us they seem completely logical and rational, or vice versa.

Re:Intersting Tomb Contents

[lawpoop]

But we really can't perceive most things directly . . only their effects. We do not see objects; we see light reflected off of them.

If you're going to argue that, then the logical conclusion is that we don't perceive *anything* directly -- that there is no such thing as direct perception. Or would you count touch as direct perception?

I think it's fair to go with a definition of direct perception as impinging upon any of the five senses -- sight, smell, touch, taste, or sound. In other words, if you sensed it directly, rather than concluding a presence or being told about it, we could call that direct perceptions. And for germs, we can't directly perceive them with our senses. We need a tool to do it, a tool that's too difficult to use in day-to-day life.

Who Knew?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that's good news! All these years I've been called a pot head and come to find out through the miracle of botany, I am a shaman!

missing from the summary

[commodoresloat]

"The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China. The man had a very large smile on his face."

Red Tape

[TornCityVenz]

"Researchers needed about 10 months to cut red tape barring the transfer of the cannabis to England from China, Russo said." This is an obscene amount of time for research related materials to have to wait...they should have just stuffed it into some teething rings and imported them through normal distribution channels.

Re:Red Tape

[jamstar7]

They could have talked with the CIA about it. If they can smuggle tons of heroin out of Southeast Asia, a mere pound of grass shouldn't be a problem...

780 grams? That's not mucking about!

[Fluffeh]

Wow, they really did plan ahead for a rainy day didn't they? I mean, that's a fair bit of shrubbery to be hauling about by anyone's measure.

Also explains...

[Fluffeh]

Why those mongols kept invading till someone built that big nasty wall up between backyards. I can see it now:

Mongol: Pssst, you got a yuan bag?
Wall Guard: Oy! Get out of here, we don't do that at this tower, try two doors down.
Mongol: Pssst, is Fey Shong Wei about? He always hooks me up.
Wall Guard: I said piss off! I got my boss coming for an inspection in a bit.
Mongol: Fine fine, sissy girly man, no wonder you need this big wall to keep out a few baked horsemen!
Wall Guard: Get back to your tent you damned hippie! And get a REAL job! And a HAIRCUT! And have a SHOWER!

Argh

[moniker127]

I was wondering why my blue eyed caucasian friend scott kept borrowing my time machine.
Now I know.

Well Well, Excellent.

[Roskolnikov]

So my only question is was this Bill or Ted? Time Travel and George Carlin come to mind :)

Re:Well Well, Excellent.

[the_fat_kid]

Bill S. Preston, Esq.

Ancient Nugz

[cfreukes]

"Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache" Man, sounds like schwagg!

Re:Ancient Nugz

[yamamushi]

Totally! 789g of Budz would have been awesome to take over into the afterlife, unfortunately this guy was obviously screwed over by his dealer. In other news, oldest munchies stash found!

And look what happened to the guy who smoked that

[Anonymous Coward]

He's dead!

Take note kids.

Hey man....

[Star Particle]

you ever go crawling around ancient Chinese shaman's tombs....... on weed?

And here's the last song he played...

[BluBrick]

I was gonna pillage you,

But I got high.

I was gonna sack your village too,

But I got high.

I'm stuck here in this tomb, and I know why.

Because I got high, because I got high, because I got hi-igh.

Re:And here's the last song he played...

[Captain Splendid]

*golf clap*

Re:And here's the last song he played...

[operagost]

When you run off to sack and pillage, don't forget to bring a towel!

Street value

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that I know anything about... *cough* yes, we'll just tick the 'Anonymous' box, yes, there we are.

In the Chicago area, for 'Pretty Good' cannabis, you're talking between $200 and $400 per ounce, conservatively. 789 grams is approximately 27.8 ounces, that's $5,400-$10,800 total value, conservative estimate, depending on quality relative to today's standards.

789 grams ???

[tommeke100]

sure, that's what they said they've found. I wonder what happened with the other 30 kilo ;-)

Imagine that

[Technopaladin]

Conversation at Customs.

Um no Officer that isnt my weed. That is the result of an archeological find.

Sure, Cuff him. We hear that all the time.

Or the Dead guy was just holding it for a friend.

Too bad

[DaFallus]

Would have been funnier if it was found in Indochina...

Re:Too bad

[DF5JT]

Would have been funnier if it had had the right grammar.

Nice Save!

[kieblerh]

I was about to jump in my time machine with 789 grams of pot. Good thing i read this before hand. Im just going to stay home and smoke this stash now!

Blown

[kieblerh]

Ever get so high that you thought you went 7200 years in the past and you were in china....oh crap

2700 year old surfer

[mhaskell]

The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China

Last words were "Whoa, clench time tsunami dude!"