Ancient Indonesian foragers may have used psychoactive nuts 25,000 years ago

From the limestone soils of Sulawesi, two sets of ancient teeth have offered humanity a mirror held up across 25,000 years — reflecting not conquest or invention, but the quiet, persistent human reach toward altered experience. Chemical traces of arecoline and grooves worn deep into enamel suggest that long before agriculture or written memory, foragers were habitually sucking betel nuts, seeking numbness or euphoria in a world without pharmacies or priests. The discovery, published in Science Advances, repositions the origin of intentional psychoactive consumption further back than any prior