Hair and seeds from a Siberian tomb suggest people used cannabis to get high 2,800 years ago

Nearly 3,000 years ago, someone was laid to rest in a grand tomb in southern Siberia, surrounded by cannabis seeds. Now a team of archaeologists reports that the dead, or the people who buried them, may also have used cannabis to get high. The evidence comes from the plant remains and from strands of preserved hair, and the researchers say it is the oldest directly dated evidence of cannabis use for its intoxicating effects.

A princely tomb on the Siberian steppe

The find comes from Tunnug 1, an excavation site in the Tyva Republic in southern Siberia. The burial belonged to high-ranking members of Scythian society. The Scythians were horse-riding people of the Eurasian steppe, and their elite funerals could be spectacular. At Tunnug, the burial mound held several wooden structures with log coffins, and horse skeletons lay on top of them. Earlier work on the mound reported 18 horses, and excavators have since found several dozen more horse sacrifices and scattered human bones.

The new study, led by Gino Caspari of the University of Bern and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, appeared in the journal Science on 5 November 2026. Its title makes the claim plain: “Direct evidence for psychoactive cannabis use 2800 years ago.”

What the team found in the grave

Excavators recovered about 1,000 cannabis seeds from the tomb. Live Science, which also covered the paper, reports more than 1,000 whole seeds plus roughly 500 partial ones. The team radiocarbon dated six of the seeds directly and placed them in the early 8th century BCE, roughly 800 to 760 BCE. The researchers suggest the seeds most likely came from wild plants.

Seeds alone cannot tell you whether anyone got high. Plenty of ancient people could have used hemp for fiber, food or oil. So the team also analyzed preserved human hair from the central burial chamber, using molecular methods that include high-resolution mass spectrometry. Several hair samples showed clear signals of cannabinol, or CBN, and weaker signals consistent with THC. THC is the main intoxicating compound in cannabis, and CBN forms partly when THC oxidizes. That chemistry supports the idea that the person or people whose hair survived had been exposed to the drug.

“The molecular traces in the hair and the cannabis seeds come from the same grave and suggest that cannabis was used for its intoxicating properties,” Caspari said in the press release. He added that the seeds show cannabis “played an important role in the rituals surrounding the burial.”

Why the date matters

Written sources have long hinted that Scythians used cannabis. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, described Scythians inhaling the fumes of hemp seeds. Archaeologists have also reported cannabis use at a Chinese cemetery dated to about 500 BCE. According to Live Science, the Tunnug evidence pushes the record of intoxicating use back by about three centuries. For the first time, a grave links physical traces of the drug in a human body to securely dated plant remains.

The finding also fits a pattern at later Central Asian sites, where researchers have found cannabinoid residues on vessels and on heated stones. Those finds point to inhalation, which matches Herodotus. The Tunnug evidence is far older and gives no direct clue about how people took the drug.

What the evidence cannot tell us

The authors are careful about the limits. The hair analysis does not show how much cannabis anyone consumed. It cannot confirm whether people smoked it, breathed fumes or ate it. And nobody knows how potent these ancient plants were, or whether people selected or cultivated them for their effects.

Live Science also reports that Caspari believes the princely burial most likely included human sacrifices, and that cannabis could have calmed the people chosen for the ritual. That is an interpretation drawn from the burial context, not something the data show directly. It remains a hypothesis.

What comes next

The team is now sequencing DNA from the plant samples. The researchers say DNA preservation is excellent in this case, and they expect the results to shed light on how cannabis was domesticated and how it spread across Eurasia. If the plants turn out to be wild, as the team suspects, the genetic data could help show when people began breeding cannabis for particular traits.

For now, a single tomb on the steppe gives us a rare, chemical glimpse of a ritual that happened 2,800 years ago. It suggests that humans and cannabis shared a long, complicated history, and that ancient funerals may have involved more than horses and gold.

Sources

• Caspari G. et al. (2026), “Direct evidence for psychoactive cannabis use 2800 years ago,” Science: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aeg3800
• University of Bern and Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology press release: https://www.gea.mpg.de/249668/cannabis-used-as-intoxicant-2-800-years-ago
• Live Science coverage: Live Science
• Phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2026-11-cannabis-intoxicant-early-years.html