
New World Drugs in Old World Mummies? - benbreen
https://ahotcupofjoe.net/2019/05/new-world-drugs-in-old-world-mummies/
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toomanybeersies
An interesting question is that if there were plants containing cocaine in
Africa, why were they not cultivated and selectively bred like in South
America, and subsequently driven extinct?

Answering my own question, I guess that would possibly by due to the
prevalence of coffee. Coca leaves on their own are about as stimulating as
caffeine.

The main advantage that Coca leaves (and hence cocaine) have over Coffee beans
and caffeine is that large doses of cocaine don't cause the same negative
effects as large doses of caffeine. You can rack lines of caffeine like coke,
and they do wire you up, but the anxiety and nausea makes it really not worth
it.

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Gravityloss
The Romans had a widely used spice that went extinct. We only have textual
descriptions. It couldn't be transplanted and local people had an interest in
having sheep, which ate it.

There are probably interesting plants vanishing in ecosystem destruction at a
quicker rate right now than in the last ten thousand years.

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tempguy9999
that's laser, or silphium

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silphium)

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sfkdjf9j3j
Here's a great comment on r/askhistorians about this topic:
[https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4t6htu/was_t...](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4t6htu/was_there_tobacco_in_eurasia_before_the_columbian/d5fckte/)

 _In summary, the preponderance of evidence (and lack thereof) strongly
indicates that the presence of these New World drugs in Egyptian mummies is
the result of contamination in museum and other contexts from the last two
centuries. The chemical analyses are hardly smoking guns, and the complete
lack of any other evidence for such exchange across the hemispheres (or in any
goods other than coca and tobacco) means that trade is a fairly preposterous
explanation for the presence of these drug compounds on the mummies._

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one2zero
So the explanation is that people were doing lines off of these mummies and
severed heads?

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whenchamenia
Many antiquities like mummies were (are?) commonly smuggled. The connection
seems an easy one. But I enjoy your hypothesis.

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yellowapple
Re: the points about the Egyptians neither having boats suited for cross-
Atlantic travel nor bragging about traveling across the Atlantic: could they
not have traded with someone else who _did_ have the means to reach the
Americas? Or perhaps who in turn traded with someone else who had that access?

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pySSK
The Madagascar origin doesn't make sense since the island wasn't settled until
500 CE (intersting fact: and that too was by Austronesians. Africans didn't
settle Madagascar until later)

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flukus
This is my new favorite site. With so much of this stuff it's hard to find
real info outside of the insular circle of crazies.

