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Richard D

(9,353 posts)
Tue May 7, 2019, 12:26 AM May 2019

Ancient hallucinogens found in 1,000-year-old shamanic pouch


A small pouch, made from three fox snouts neatly sewn together, may contain the world’s earliest archaeological evidence for the consumption of ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant preparation indigenous to peoples of the Amazon basin that produces potent hallucinations.

The pouch likely belonged to a shaman in what is now southwestern Bolivia around a thousand years ago, according to José Capriles, an anthropologist at Penn State University and an author of a paper published on the discovery today in the journal PNAS.

Capriles found the pouch—and evidence of its trip-inducing contents—during a 2010 archaeological dig in Cueva del Chileno, a rock shelter that shows signs of human activity going back 4,000 years.

The cave was once used as a tomb, and though later looters took the bodies, they left behind what they considered to be garbage—beads, braids of human hair, and what Capriles first thought was a leather shoe.


https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/05/ancient-hallucinogens-oldest-ayahuasca-found-shaman-pouch/
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Ancient hallucinogens found in 1,000-year-old shamanic pouch (Original Post) Richard D May 2019 OP
3 fox snouts dweller May 2019 #1
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