Pass The Brazier: Early Evidence Of Cannabis Smoking Found On Chinese Artifacts

"People have been smoking pot to get high for at least 2,500 years. Chinese archaeologists found signs of that when they studied the char on a set of wooden bowls from an ancient cemetery in western China."

"The findings are some of the earliest evidence of cannabis used as a drug."

"'We've known that cannabis is one of the oldest cultivated plants in East Asia, primarily for making oil and hemp,' says Mark Merlin, a botany professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa who reviewed the study published in Science Advances.'Now we know the ancients also valued the plant for its psychoactive properties.'"

"The set of 10 wooden braziers come from eight tombs at the ancient Jirzankal Cemetery on the Pamir Plateau in what is now China's Xinjiang region. Researchers found chemical evidence of cannabis in residue on nine of the braziers, which held small stones that were apparently heated and used to burn the plants."

"Yimin Yang, an archaeologist at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and a co-author of the study, says the location of those artifacts suggests cannabis smoke was 'being used during funeral rituals, possibly to communicate with nature or spirits or deceased people, accompanied by music.'"