IV. PRESENTACIÓN DE RESULTADOS
4.2 DESARROLLO DEL OBJETIVO ESPECÍFICO 1:
Drugs in Ancient Drugs in Ancient Drugs in Ancient Drugs in Ancient Drugs in Ancient America
America America America America
It would appear that South America has been the world’s supplier of narcotics far longer than assumed, according to this especially provocative article in the January/February, 1995 issue of Ancient American. Its author, a biology researcher in Austin, Texas, reveals a direct, surprising link between the Andes Mountains and the Nile Valley.
They Came for the Cocaine
by A.J. Julius
Were South Americans providing drug-plants to inhabitants of the Nile Valley 3,000 years ago? Did trade-routes connect the ancient empires of the
C HAPTER 6:
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Discovering the Mysteries of Ancient America Egyptians and the Inca? Not according to most modern historians, because theories of transoceanic contact and diffusion have suffered from a supposed lack of supporting hard evidence. However, a recent report from scholars in Germany is rekindling the debate.Researchers at the Institute for Anthropology and Human Genetics at the University of Munich have detected cocaine and nicotine in the tissue of Egyptian mummies. These surprising results are diffi-cult to explain. Cocaine and nicotine are members of a chemical class of compounds known as alkaloids. Plants containing alkaloids have been culturally and economically important for thousands of years. Nicotine is found in a number of plants around the world;
the same cannot be said of cocaine. Coca plant (Erythroxylum) was unknown in the Old World until after the Spanish expeditions to South America during the 15th and 16th centuries. Since then, it has been cultivated in other parts of the world. Nearly a year after the report appeared in Naturwissenschaften (“Natural Science,”
1992), the journal published several controversial letters received from the scientific community. Some felt the editorial staff had been sloppy in reviewing the manuscript, and that the project was either a bizarre hoax or an experiment gone wrong. The researchers were attacked because they failed to include proper controls, and the possibility of instrumental error was not sufficiently ruled out. Dr.
Franz Parsche, one of the mummy researchers, responded, “... our analysis provides clear evidence for the presence of alkaloids in ancient human remains.”
The investigators offered no explanation for how the drug compounds came to exist in the mummies but defended their results as correct, citing the known reliability of the analytical methods employed.
Several explanations were offered by scientists. Some mummies might have absorbed tobacco smoke while being studied and displayed in museums. Perhaps the drug reactions resulted from residual pesti-cides used during preservation and storage. Several scientists noted that unknown chemical reactions might have occurred in the mum-mified skin, hair, and bone tissues tested. The composition of
Egyptian mummification chemicals is not well-known, but we do know that the procedure varied somewhat over time. This uncertainty supports the valid existence of these drugs in the mummies. Mate-rials tested were dated from 1070 B.C. to 395 A.D., and all were positive for cocaine and nicotine.
On one hand, it is unlikely that the embalming techniques of the Egyptians were so static more than 1,500 years, so as to pro-duce the same long-term chemical results. On the other hand, it is uncertain how long cocaine and nicotine are stable in mummified remains. Perhaps native plants (unknown today) that contained cocaine, nicotine, or related alkaloids, were used by the Egyptians. Such plants could have been medicinally important or consumed in the normal diet. Nicotine is found in many members of the plant family Solanaceae, which includes food and drug-plants such as tomato, potato, tobacco, and jimson weed.
If the drugs were not of local origin, and they are not “artifacts”
in the mummies, only one possibility remains. The findings would be good forensic evidence for pre-Columbian transoceanic contact.
Because the mummies tested covered a broad timespan, such con-tact would have been well established and regular, unless plants could be returned to Egypt and propagated. Coca is a well-known anaesthetic and stimulant. If the occasion should arise, it would be a likely candidate for transfer between ancient medical practitioners.
The useful properties of the plant were known to South Americans before the Inca. Today, inhabitants of the mountainous regions of Peru and Bolivia use coca much as their ancestors did. Leaves are chewed with powdered lime (calcium carbonate, traditionally from crushed shells or ashes). The lime creates alkaline conditions in the saliva to extract the cocaine and other alkaloids more efficiently.
Egyptian medical writings go back 4,000 years and were advanced for their time. Egyptian doctors were in demand throughout the known world. Although they practiced surgery and had a diverse
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Discovering the Mysteries of Ancient America apothecary, as far as we know, their understanding of anesthetics and stimulants was poor. There are no writings or artifacts that clearly refer to or depict New World herbs or procedures, such as coca leaf-chewing. Research suggests that dispersal of medicinal knowledge was slow in ancient times.“We should not put our interpretation of these drugs as they are used in modern societies to the Egyptians,” argues Dr. Parsche,
“further experiments are in progress to clarify some of these issues.”
Clarification is needed. Mummies are not rare and there is ample material available for testing. Further research may help us under-stand this biochemical enigma; until then, the mystery of the Egyptian drug-mummies remains unsolved.