Shillong, Sep 11: People have been getting a hit from the ingestion of areca (betel) nut, known as kwai in Khasi, for much longer than previously thought, perhaps up to 25,000 years, new research has found.
Research conducted by scientists from Australia’s Griffith University found that ancient Indonesians had tell-tale signs of betel use. If the evidence is correct, this would be the “earliest evidence for drug use anywhere in the world,” the BBC quoted Prof Adam Brumm, who led the research, as saying. Previously, it was believed that the first drug was alcohol produced after humans had started farming, some 13,000 years ago.
The areca palm is thought to have originated in what is now the Philippines and then taken across South, East and South East Asia through trade and migration.
This new study was published in Science Advances, a peer-reviewed journal. In it, researchers reported two rare skeletal remains of human foragers on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. While one was much more recent – between 6,300 and 7,600 years old – the other was from 16,000 to 25,000 years ago.
“Both of the hunter-gatherers showed an unusual dental wear pattern with deep, rounded tooth grooves,” the BBC said, which the researchers suggested was caused by sucking whole areca nuts. This is a practice different to modern ways of consuming betel, which typically involve chewing on the nuts accompanied by slaked lime (calcium hydroxide) and the betel leaf (which is from a different tree to the nut).
Betel nut is the world’s fourth-most widely used psychoactive substance, Brumm said, after alcohol, caffeine and nicotine, and is used by hundreds of millions of people.
Like in much of the rest of the region, kwai plays an important part in Khasi-Jaintia traditions, such as during weddings, funerals and day-to-day life. Khasi folklore tells of how kwai was introduced as an acceptable way of welcoming guests to the home when the previous practice was to feed all guests a meal, which could become a financial burden on the very poor. This new research implies that modern behaviour is “deeply rooted in forager traditions,” Brumm added.
Sucking on areca nuts does not release the same level of psychoactive compounds into the body as chewing betel but it was enough to alter brain function, the researchers found.
The effects of sucking betel nuts may have been milder than chewing but it was still harmful, with the scientists finding evidence of gum disease in the two sets of remains. Chewing areca nut, meanwhile, is widely accepted to increase the risk of multiple forms of cancer and cardiovascular disease.
