American farmers got stoned a lot

Two articles this morning both point to the widespread use of hallucinogenic plants in ancient South America. National Geographic reports that traces of the mind-altering substance harmine have been found in the hair of Tiwanaku mummies from the coastal Chilean desert dating back to 800-1200 AD. Harmine comes from the Amazonian vine Banisteriopsis caapi, which suggests that an extensive trade network linked the rainforest to the desert. Elaborate sniffing kits have been found in many Tiwanaku tombs and also, as a Times article points out, at the other end of the continent in the Caribbean. Archaeologists have found ceramic bowls and inhaling tubes on the island of Carriacou and have identified them as originating in South America between 100-400 BC. The drug of choice in this case may have been cohoba.

So why was everyone getting high?

Richard Davenport-Hines, a former history lecturer at the London School of Economics and author of The Pursuit of Oblivion, a global history of narcotics, believes humans have been using drugs for thousands of years. “Drug use became widespread in many early agriculture-based societies simply because it was the only way people could cope with spending long hours working in the fields, often in horrible conditions like baking sun,” he said.

Six million and counting

So the Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium reached its 6 millionth specimen. ((Incidentally, that’s about the number of germplasm accessions in all the world’s genebanks, give or take half a million.)) ((And another thing: if you’ve got nice photos of botanic gardens, you can enter them into a competition.)) Pretty impressive, as these things go, and as good an opportunity as any to sing the praises of natural history collections. The specimen in question is Anthurium centimillesimum, a new aroid species from Ecuador. I wonder if it will ever join the ranks of the world’s 35,000 cultivated plants.

Are species like cans of soup?

A longish article in the latest Wired does what seems to this untutored eye a good job of describing the controversy about barcoding. Here’s the case against in a nutshell:

“We’re not accusing Hebert of being a creationist, just of acting like one,” says Brent Mishler.

and the case for:

The space ship lands. He steps out. He points it around. It says “friendly – unfriendly – edible – poisonous – dangerous – living – inanimate.”

There are a lot of pithy quotes like those and astute observations, such as the one that Charles Darwin was a parataxonomist. Well worth reading. We have, of course, blogged about barcoding before.