Seeds discovered at an ancient campsite in Nevada indicate people have been using tobacco for at least 12,300 years, which is far longer than previously thought.
Tobacco plants are native to North America, and humans are thought to have reached the continent around 20,000 to 16,000 years ago. “This suggests that people learned the intoxicant properties of tobacco relatively early in their time here rather than only with domestication and agriculture thousands of years later,” says at the Far Western Anthropological Research Group, Nevada.
Duke and his colleagues reached this conclusion after discovering four charred tobacco seeds, each less than a millimetre wide, preserved under sediment in the remnants of a fire at the Wishbone campsite in Nevada, which was first discovered in 2015.
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The team retrieved burnt wood from the ash and used radiocarbon dating to estimate its age at 12,300 years, making the seeds the earliest evidence for tobacco usage by humans. Before this discovery, the oldest traces of nicotine were found in a 3000-year-old smoking pipe from a site in Alabama.
“The tobacco seeds were the big surprise. They are incredibly small and rare to be preserved,” says Duke.
The team think that Indigenous people may have smoked and sucked tobacco at the fireside alongside activities such as food preparation, cooking and tool-making. “We don’t know what people at the Wishbone site thought about tobacco, but its fireside use is something easy to identify with as a human being,” says Duke.
People at Wishbone could have harvested tobacco leaves and stems, as these parts contain nicotine, and made them into wads of plant fibre, called quids, for sucking. The seeds, which don’t contain nicotine, will have been picked up during the harvest, then discarded into the fire once finished, the team speculates. Quids have been previously found to be used by Indigenous communities in this region.
“Quids are something akin to pouch tobacco, placed behind the lip, then discarded when done. Of course, smoking was surely possible too,” says Duke.
The team also found bones from various duck species, but ruled out the possibility that the seeds were from the stomachs of cooked birds. “Ducks do not eat tobacco, which is toxic to them, as it is to most predators,” says Duke.
Another possibility is that the tobacco plants were used to fuel the fire, but tobacco burns quickly, making it a poor fuel choice. The team couldn’t find any traces of ancient tobacco in nearby areas of a similar age to the discovery site, providing further evidence that humans gathered tobacco from elsewhere.
The finding suggests that tobacco usage may have “formed the basis for human manipulation of other plants and may be a key component of the development of agriculture in North America”, says at the International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello.
Nature Human Behaviour
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