When did ancient humans start taking drugs?

Explain In Paint is an anonymous narrator channel making long-form explainers on human history. This one asks when people first started using mind-altering substances, and works through the archaeological evidence continent by continent, from a sealed antler tube in a Bronze Age cave on Menorca to a 13,000-year-old brewery in Israel. Its stance is curious rather than promotional: the narrator flags where evidence is thin, separates hypothesis from finding, and is explicit that the stoned ape hypothesis is not settled science. That care makes it a useful entry point into the history of these substances, though several claims deserve checking against primary sources.

Animals, instinct, and the limits of the record

The video opens with a catalogue of animals that appear to seek intoxication: Siberian reindeer eating psychoactive mushrooms, elephants travelling for fermented marula fruit, wallabies in Tasmanian opium poppy fields, dolphins reportedly passing pufferfish between them. The narrator cites researcher Ronald Siegel, who proposed that the pursuit of intoxication may act as a fourth drive alongside hunger, thirst and reproduction. Siegel's framing remains debated, and several of the anecdotes (the dolphins in particular) rest on documentary footage rather than controlled observation.

The more careful point follows immediately. Most psychoactive substances leave almost no archaeological trace: plants rot, smoke disperses, and what survives does so through unusual luck, whether residue sealed in a container, alkaloids in preserved hair, or pollen locked in sediment. The narrator draws the right inference. Every find records a practice that was probably already old when it left its trace, so dated evidence sets a floor, not a start date.

What has actually been found

The video's tour of the physical evidence is its strongest section. Chemical traces of cannabis in wooden burners at burial sites in China and Central Asia date to roughly 4,600 years ago, found alongside a harp, suggesting music and altered states were part of the same funerary occasion. The Es Carritx cave on Menorca produced hair with traces of ephedrine, atropine and scopolamine, consumed repeatedly over at least a year by what appears to have been a ritual specialist. In the Americas, peyote buttons have been carbon dated to around 4,000 BC, and Mesoamerican mushroom carvings point to established psilocybin use at least 2,500 years ago, with indigenous oral traditions suggesting considerably deeper roots.

The narrator singles out ayahuasca as the standing puzzle: someone in the Amazon worked out that a specific vine and a specific leaf, prepared a specific way, produce an effect neither produces alone. Indigenous accounts say the plants gave the instruction, and the video is honest that no better explanation has been offered.

Ritual first, recreation later

Across every region surveyed, the video notes that the earliest evidence is overwhelmingly religious rather than recreational. Cannabis burned to reach the dead, peyote used only in ceremony, mushrooms depicted beside gods. The narrator raises the question of convergence: why did unconnected cultures independently settle on plant-induced altered states as a route to the divine, when fasting, pain, music and dance were also available? Some anthropologists, the video says, now argue that psychedelics may be an origin point for religious ideas themselves. This is presented as a live hypothesis, not a finding, and it should be read that way.

The section on alcohol is the least contested. Fermented rice, honey and fruit residues at Jiahu in China go back around 9,000 years, and the Raqefet Cave brewery in Israel pushes deliberate brewing to roughly 13,000 years ago, before settled agriculture. The narrator presents the beer before bread hypothesis fairly, including that most archaeologists consider it an overstatement.

"We will always find older evidence because the practice is older than our ability to detect it," the narrator says.

The stoned ape hypothesis, handled carefully

The video gives Terence McKenna's 1992 proposal a full segment and labels it a hypothesis, repeatedly. The claim is that early hominids eating psilocybin mushrooms on the African savannah gained visual acuity, pattern recognition and social bonding advantages that accelerated brain development. The narrator then lists the objections directly: acquired drug experiences are not heritable, the timeline is vague, and there is no fossil evidence. What survives, in the video's reading, is narrower and better supported. Psilocybin does appear to promote neuroplastic change and cognitive flexibility in laboratory settings. That is a real finding, and it is not the same as the evolutionary claim.

The closing section covers Sumerian opium, Egyptian blue lotus, and the Eleusinian Mysteries, where 2020 residue analysis of a cup from a Greek site in Spain found ergot, a fungus containing precursors related to LSD. The video presents this as strong support for a psychoactive kykeon. It is suggestive, but a single residue find at one site is not proof of what was drunk at Eleusis itself, and that caveat goes unstated.

Key takeaways

• ●Dated archaeological evidence marks the oldest surviving trace, not the start of the practice; almost all such finds imply an already established tradition.
• ●The oldest direct chemical evidence for psychoactive drug use runs to roughly 4,600 years ago in Asia, with peyote in the Americas carbon dated to around 6,000 years ago.
• ●The Es Carritx hair analysis suggests sustained, repeated use by a ritual specialist rather than one-off experimentation.
• ●Deliberate fermentation predates agriculture: the Raqefet Cave brewery dates to around 13,000 years ago.
• ●The beer before bread hypothesis is a real academic debate, and the video correctly notes that most archaeologists regard it as overstated.
• ●The stoned ape hypothesis is explicitly labelled unproven; the neuroplasticity research it is often confused with is a separate and much better supported line of work.
• ●The ergot residue linked to the Eleusinian Mysteries is genuinely interesting but comes from one site, and the video treats it more firmly than the evidence warrants.
• ●The broader claim that survives scrutiny is modest: seeking altered states appears to be an ancient, widespread and usually ritualised human behaviour, not a modern malfunction.