Humans

Cannabis edibles offer a different way to consume the drugShutterstock/Brian Goodman
For people who want their cannabis without the smoke, edibles provide an increasingly popular alternative. And it isn’t just pot brownies, either. Gummies, tinctures and other products can be laced with the drug.
“The availability of different types of products makes it so that there’s something for everyone,” says Jibran Khokhar at Western University in Canada.
[special_article_unit title=”The science of cannabis” description=”As the use of marijuana and its compounds rises around the world, New Scientist… More

A femur, one of the bones that held traces of cannabisGaia Giordano, Mirko Mattia, Michele Boracchi, et al.
The first evidence of cannabis discovered in archaeological skeletal remains comes from bones of people buried under a hospital in Milan, Italy, in the 17th century.
“Molecules of medicinal plants can be detected by toxicological analysis even centuries after the death of an individual,” says Gaia Giordano at the University of Milan in Italy.
She and her colleagues discovered molecules of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) – the psychoactive components of cannabis – within the thigh bones of a young man and middle-aged woman who had been buried between 1638 and 1697. Such molecules can be trapped and preserved after being absorbed into the bloodstream and travelling through blood vessels into bone tissue.Advertisement
Giordano and her colleagues extracted bone samples from the remains of nine people. The individuals were buried in a crypt at Milan’s Ca’ Granda hospital in the 17th century, and the researchers confirmed this using radiocarbon dating.
They then performed toxicology analyses by powdering and preparing the bone samples so that individual chemical compounds could be separated and purified within a liquid solution. This let them use mass spectrometry to identify the chemical components.

The science of cannabis

As the use of marijuana and its compounds rises around the world, New Scientist explores the latest research on the medical potential of cannabis, how it is grown and its environmental impact, the way cannabis affects our bodies and minds and what the marijuana of the future will look like.

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The researchers did not find any mention of cannabis in the Ca’ Granda hospital’s records of medicinal compounds. So, Giordano says the people may have been self-medicating or using the cannabis recreationally, instead of receiving it as a prescribed treatment.
The study is unique in using this toxicology method to analyse human remains at an archaeological site, says Yimin Yang at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. “I think their study will open a new window for researching cannabis consumption in ancient times,” he says.

Yang’s own research previously found chemical traces of cannabis on wooden braziers in tombs dating back 2500 years ago. And cannabis has an even longer history of becoming humanity’s favourite weed, starting with its domestication around 12,000 years ago.
Meanwhile, Giordano and her colleagues are expanding their toxicological search to other substances, such as cocaine, in more modern human remains.

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Many people think cannabis products help them sleepShutterstock/Aiman Dairabaeva
Forget counting sheep and warm bubble baths. For millions of people who have problems falling and staying asleep, cannabis has become an increasingly popular sleep aid. But the evidence that the drug can help is limited.
“The hype surrounding cannabis has definitely outpaced the science behind it,” says Karim Ladha at the University of Toronto.
For instance, in a 2022 survey of more than 27,000 adults living in the US and Canada, scientists found that 46 per cent of respondents said they… More

Users may feel cannabis boosts their creativityShutterstock/Agave Photo Studio
“Write drunk, edit sober,” goes the famous saying that is often – probably apocryphally – attributed to Ernest Hemingway. It is debatable whether that is sound advice with any substance, but when that notion is applied to cannabis use, it is almost certainly a bad idea.
Research into the connection between cannabis and creativity has found no evidence that the drug boosts ingenuity. But it does make people who use it feel good, which in turn makes them perceive their ideas – and others’ –… More

Homo naledi coexisted with Homo sapiens, but had a smaller brainXinhua/Shutterstock
The much-publicised claim that a species of small-brained ancient human buried its dead and produced rock art is completely unfounded, according to a group of researchers.
“The evidence for burial and rock art is non-existent,” says Michael Petraglia at Griffith University in Nathan, Australia.
However, the researchers behind the original claim say they are hard at work gathering more evidence to build their case. They also contend that their studies are caught up in a wider debate over how scientific… More

Cannabis has complicated effects on memoryMarkusBeck/iStockphoto
The stereotype of a stoner – someone who uses copious amounts of cannabis – is that they are scatterbrained and absent-minded. But how cannabis affects memory is more complicated than this caricature lets on.
For starters, memory is a complex, multi-faceted process. There is long-term memory – the information we retain for months or years – and short-term memory, which lasts only a few minutes. Then there is working memory, which is where we hold information in mind and manipulate it. Working memory allows us to do… More

P.PLAILLY/E.DAYNES/SCIEN​CE PHOTO LIBRARY
IT ISN’T often that an esteemed professor sets out to investigate a scientific discovery made by a 15-year-old boy, but in 1938 Robert Broom made an exception. The British-born palaeontologist was keenly aware that 1930s South Africa was gaining a reputation for its exceptionally primitive-looking hominin fossils. So, when he heard that schoolchild Gert Terblanche had discovered fragments of a hominin skull in a cave there, he tracked him down immediately. Broom’s visit to the boy’s school paid off – he later recalled that the teenager was sauntering around with “four of what are perhaps the most valuable teeth in the world in his trouser pocket”.
Within months, Broom had finished analysing the fossils. Deciding they were unlike anything discovered before, he gave the ancient hominin a new name: Paranthropus.
But despite his confidence that the remains were valuable, Paranthropus never became famous. Perhaps that is because it was a misfit: it resembled one of our small-brained ancestors, but it was present on Earth long after other ape-like hominins had given way to big-brained humans. Even among palaeoanthropologists, Paranthropus is described as the “forgotten” hominin.
Perhaps not for much longer. Spurred on by the discovery of more fossils, researchers are finally reassessing this addition to our evolutionary tree – and their work suggests it was one of the oddest. Paranthropus may have been a skilled tool-maker, but it also potentially grazed grass like a cow and communicated with low rumbles like an elephant. The question now is, can the research bring us closer to understanding how the last of the ape-people survived in a world that was dominated… More

Dolmen of menga, a megalithic burial mound in SpainimageBROKER.com GmbH & Co. KG/Alamy
This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox for free every month.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: ancient Greek statues weren’t always plain white marble. Many of these sculptures were actually painted in vivid colours. However, most of the pigments have either eroded away or been scraped off by overzealous museum curators, leaving us with just the underlying white stone.
For example,… More