Author: Jennifer Leman / Source: Science News
Ancient pipes and pipe fragments found at five archaeological sites along the Snake and Columbia rivers in Washington contain evidence of tobacco use, new research shows.
The finds suggest that indigenous people there smoked tobacco-filled pipes long before Europeans brought the plant west.Chemical traces of nicotine, tobacco’s key ingredient, on the artifacts date to around 1,200 years ago. That’s roughly 600 years before European fur traders were thought to have first introduced domesticated tobacco to Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, researchers report online October 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Cultivated tobacco seeds from roughly 3,500 years ago have been found at archaeological sites in the southern United States, and evidence…
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