Pre - Columbian South Americans took their head - neuter drugs very gravely indeed . A sac containing remnants of at least five psychotropic drugs , from at least three dissimilar plants , have been found in a bundle remember to be used in a shamanic ritual , indicating the view put into gear up for these case a millennium ago .
A rock shelter in the Sora River valley , in southwestern Bolivia , has been intermittently occupied by humans for 4,000 years . At an EL of 3,900 metre ( 13,000 feet ) life would have been hard there , and chemical assistance was on the face of it called for .
In the debris on the cave trading floor , excavations in 2008 and 2010 found remainder from rite , braids of human haircloth , cobalt blue beadwork , and a pouch made of three fox snouts . Most revealingly , there were also two wooden tablets cut up with human - shaped figures and a snuffle tubing with hair braids bind also shaped as a person . The items have been radio - carbon dated to be just over 1,000 eld old . It is believed the tablet were used to pulverize drugs plants so they could be snuffed .
Dr Melanie Miller of the University of Otago , New Zealand used passel spectrographic analysis to try a sample from the contents of the sac and a firearm of plant stem . The pouch sample “ show the mien of at least five psychotropic compound : cocain , benzoylecgonine ( BZE ) , harmine , bufotenine , dimethyltryptamine ( DMT ) , and a top perhaps refer to psilocin , ” she reports inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
Cocaine can disgrace to BZE so both could have originated from one plant , but no known plant life contains all three drugs found on the stem , let alone all five in the pouch . The pouch must have been used to hold at least three psychotropic plants , most likely coca leaves , Anadenanthera seeds and Banisteriopsis caapi , the main factor in the hallucinogenic teaayahuasca . Some , deliberately or otherwise , made contact with the stem . Miller note none of these plants grow locally , so must have been trade from far abroad .
If the potential front of psilocin is support it probably total from a fungus added to complicate the drug effects still further .
So many psychoactive drug have never been found together in a single archaeologic specimen before . " We already knew that psychotropics were important in the phantasmal and religious activities of the societies of the south - primal Andes , but we did not bed that these masses were using so many different compounds and possibly combining them together , " said co - generator Dr Jose Capriles of Penn State University in astatement .
Shamans , both in the Americas and elsewhere , used psychotropic materials to facilitate them engage with the supernatural , including communicating with the spirits of the dead .
