Ancient hallucinogens found in 1,000-year-old shamanic pouch
A small pouch, made from three fox snouts neatly sewn together, may contain the worlds earliest archaeological evidence for the consumption of ayahuasca, a psychoactive plant preparation indigenous to peoples of the Amazon basin that produces potent hallucinations.
The pouch likely belonged to a shaman in what is now southwestern Bolivia around a thousand years ago, according to José Capriles, an anthropologist at Penn State University and an author of a paper published on the discovery today in the journal PNAS.
Capriles found the pouchand evidence of its trip-inducing contentsduring a 2010 archaeological dig in Cueva del Chileno, a rock shelter that shows signs of human activity going back 4,000 years.
The cave was once used as a tomb, and though later looters took the bodies, they left behind what they considered to be garbagebeads, braids of human hair, and what Capriles first thought was a leather shoe.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/05/ancient-hallucinogens-oldest-ayahuasca-found-shaman-pouch/