A hair sample from an ancient trophy head found buried in Peru reveals that the victim consumed a psychoactive plant prior to death.
Thousands of years ago, a child in Peru was sacrificed as part of an ancient ritual, their head severed at the neck and made into a type of trophy. A new analysis of a single hair plucked from the mummy's skull reveals that the child consumed a psychoactive cactus prior to execution, as part of the ceremony.
For the study, Socha and her team collected samples of individual hairs from four trophy heads, three of which belonged to adults, and from 18 mummies of both adults and children. Toxicological examinations revealed that many of the deceased had consumed some type of psychoactive or stimulant plant prior to their deaths.
Sixteen years prior to this study, Rainer Bussmann , a professor in the Department of Ethnobiology at the Institute of Botany at Ilia State University in Tbilisi, Georgia, and the head of botany at the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart in Germany, published a study in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine examining medicinal plant usage by indigenous communities in northern Peru. Like Socha, he examined trade routes of different cultivated plants in this part of the world.
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