00:17So since 2017 we have been excavating this monumental royal tomb in southern Siberia.
00:24It's a very large burial mound, 140 meters in diameter, and now in the center of this tomb we have
00:31discovered a bunch of burials.
00:33And while excavating these, we found these tiny black spots there.
00:39Once we had them, we picked them out and they turned out to be seeds.
00:43Cannabis seeds do have this beautiful vascular net-like pattern on the surface, and so the identification was relatively quickly
00:51done.
00:51But when we discovered preserved human hair only a few hours later, we knew exactly what we had to do.
01:01It's only so often as an archaeologist that you do get to drug test a person that's been dead for
01:08almost 3,000 years.
01:16So we have these famous pirates of Herodotus talking about the Scythians going into the tent, smoking and laughing crazily.
01:25That has always taken as an indication that the peoples on the steppe were actually consuming cannabis.
01:32So what we cannot probably assume is a sort of recreational use, like after work, I smoke a joint type
01:40of stuff.
01:41Clearly, in a burial context, there's some aspect of ritual behind this.
01:48There might be some sinister aspects as well, because we have a lot of horse sacrifices and also potentially human
01:54sacrifices.
01:55And this might be beneficial if the humans that you're about to sacrifice are somewhat sedated at least.
02:05That is speculation and an interpretation based on the context.
02:09That might be an option here, but we can't prove that.
02:29That might be an option here.
02:30That might be an option here.
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