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Comment by amanaplanacanal | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a huge stretch. They find tiny spoons, and assume (based on no evidence whatsoever) they are used for taking drugs. Then they list a bunch of plants available in Europe which contain drugs. None of which are commonly powdered and snorted like they are proposing.

I admittedly just skimmed the article, so maybe I missed something.

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I thought the same thing when this paper made the rounds last week.

Northern Europeans went to great lengths to import stimulants (tea, coffee, tobacco…) from around the world. It seems unlikely they had some other, native preparation for insufflation that was lost to time.

Maybe. OTOH there were native, and are still known, but not in wide use, because of inconvenient side effects. Maybe the common knowledge of how to manage these got lost because of societal changes (no more druids/shamans), social taboos (witch hunts) because of churches and so on, and lately modern laws?

Just a few of them:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amanita_muscaria

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claviceps_purpurea

and probably some forms of

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannabis

no, I'm pretty sure that's basically it.

"we found something that kinda looks like a coke spoon in some Germanic warrior burials, let's see what drugs were available to people back then - opium, nightshades, cannabis and various fungi, notably ergot".

That was what I got out of it.

Bronze pipes have been discovered in Roman-era settlements and even earlier sites. That's a long time before tobacco was available in Europe.

cannabis and opium are both smokable, and accord to TFA were both present in Central Europe during the ancient times.

I’ve never seen that, but I’d love to find it. Do you have a reference? It’s my understanding that there was no smoking in Europe before Columbus. (With the exception of smoking tents, like in Herodotus or the biblical tabernacle)

(Joke)

Maybe there was an undocumented trade route with South America and they were sniffing ground up coca leaves?

(Seriously, it's a joke)

They mention that the length of the thong by which the spoon is attached to the belt is about the right length to lift it to your face, but that's it.

Maybe they really liked tasting ice cream.

Yeah, even the intro is just "we found this, so we assumed this and that". Nothing resembling science here. It's an "idea exploration paper" and nothing more.

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