Researchers Find Evidence of Earliest Tobacco Smoking

Researchers at UC Davis uncover the earliest tobacco use in the Pacific Northwest.  Till date, we only knew that the native hunter gatherers who resided in an area that is now northwestern California, mainly fed on  acorns, salmon and other food. But researchers were amazed to see that they even smoked tobacco. Tobacco is known to have had a long history in America.

The researchers tested the organic residues that they managed to extract from pipes. The testing, which was conducted by researchers from the UC Davis Department of Anthropology and the Fiehn Metabolomics Laboratory of the UC Davis Genome Center, confirm that the residues are from tobacco they smoked. They also predict that this was grown in the region by at least A.D. 860.

With the help of additional studies, the researchers may be able to evaluate the origin of nicotine addiction, cultivation of tobacco, human management and its geographic range extension, according to the press report.

The researchers have found nicotine in an ancient pipe from an 800-year-old site located in the modern city of Pleasanton, Calif.

"Despite the economic importance of tobacco today, we know very little about its antiquity," said Shannon Tushingham, a UC Davis archaeology research associate and primary author of the study. "We believe Native American use of tobacco and other psychoactive plants is quite ancient. The methods we developed provide an important breakthrough which can be applied on even older pipes throughout the ancient Americas."

He continues to state that prior to the recent testing which was done with the help of a sensitive gas chromatography/mass spectrometry, the historical use of tobacco on the Pacific Northwest Coast was not clear. The researchers were confused whether the tobacco was introduced to the area by the European trades or they smoked some other plant.

It was a challenging task for the archaeologists to detect what plant had been smoked in the pipe, due to the age and deterioration of the pipe. It was even difficult for them to detect the content because the early tobacco had less than 2 percent nicotine content, while the present nicotine content varies from 4-8.5 percent.

Finally, a chemical process was developed after two years of experimentation, where the residue was extracted directly from the stone or clay matrix present in the pipe. They applied this process to one complete pipe and other fragments discovered from the village sites in the Tolowa ancestral territory. They found the biomarker nicotine, meaning tobacco had been smoked.

The details of the finding were published in the Journal of Archaeological Science.