HISTORY OF THE MEDICINAL USE OF TOBACCO/NICOTINE

[Ninurta]

I allways had the feeling i am more sensitive to tobacco than most are, so it was very clearly not my substance , i simply could not just smoke . But some have smoked decades .

Very likely. We all know ourselves better than anyone else does.

Nicotine processing, and therefore smoking behaviors, are in part regulated by genetics. Some people have a "smoking gene" where others do not. Oddly, perhaps, Neanderthals were found to have a gene influencing smoking behaviors and nicotine processing, and no one knows why they had it - Neanderthals did not have tobacco in their European / west Asian stomping grounds of the time, nor did they have tomatoes or potatoes - all of those nicotine-bearing crops are of western hemisphere origin.

Research into the matter is ongoing, because nicotine has been found in Egyptian mummies and the bones of some pre-Columbian Germans, so folks want to know how it got in them, and where it came from..

In the Americas, tobacco use has been documented going back at least 12,500 years, so perhaps farther back. At a site in what is now Utah, tobacco seeds were discovered around the remains of an ancient (Archaic [think: Clovis] era) times fire, from 12,500 years ago. Those seeds were probably from either nicotiana quadrivalvis or nicotiana bigelovii, which are two species of tobacco which grow wild in the western United States.

Tobacco smoking has been shown to go back nearly 4000 years in North America, demonstrated by nicotine residues in smoking pipes dated to about 1800 BC in the southeastern Untied States. However, pipes have been found that are older, back to about 3000 BC, and tobacco may have been at least one of the materials smoked in them.

Before smoking, tobacco was probably chewed, which is presumed to be the method of ingestion used at the Archaic era site in Utah. Spitting, or else discarding a spent quid, towards the fire is the proposed mechanism for the deposition of the seeds found.

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