Ayahuasca fixings found in 1,000-year-old bundle in the Andes

EurekAlert! ^ | Monday, May 6, 2019 | University of California - Berkeley

[SunkenCiv]

Today's hipster creatives and entrepreneurs are hardly the first generation to partake of ayahuasca, according to archaeologists who have discovered traces of the powerfully hallucinogenic potion in a 1,000-year-old leather bundle buried in a cave in the Bolivian Andes.

Led by University of California, Berkeley, archaeologist Melanie Miller, a chemical analysis of a pouch made from three fox snouts sewn together tested positive for at least five plant-based psychoactive substances. They included dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and harmine, key active compounds in ayahuasca, a mind-blowing brew commonly associated with the Amazon jungle...

Miller's analysis of a scraping from the fox-snout pouch and a plant sample found in the ritual bundle -- via liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry -- turned up trace amounts of bufotenine, DMT, harmine, cocaine and benzoylecgonine. Various combinations of these substances produce powerful, mind-altering hallucinations.

The discovery adds to a growing body of evidence of ritualistic psychotropic plant use going back millennia, said Miller, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Otago in New Zealand who conducted the research during her doctoral studies at UC Berkeley...

The remarkably well-preserved ritual bundle was found by archaeologists at 13,000-foot elevations in the Lipez Altiplano region of southwestern Bolivia, where llamas and alpacas roam. The leather kit dates back to the pre-Inca Tiwanaku civilization, which dominated the southern Andean highlands from about 550 to 950 A.D.

[CJ Wolf]

Good eye! Hahaha

[tet68]

What did the fox say?

He said he’d just passed a gas station.

Oh well then, squeeze him again maybe he’ll pass another one.

[SunkenCiv]

I have a refrigerator too, but I prefer the term "science experiment". ;^)

[SunkenCiv]

I think that caterpillar was full of shiitake.