Ancient teeth from Sulawesi show people were chewing betel nut 25,000 years ago

I read something today that I keep thinking about. Researchers looked at the teeth of two ancient people from Sulawesi in Indonesia, and both of them had been chewing betel nut. The older one lived somewhere between about 25,000 and 16,000 years ago. The other is a lot more recent, roughly 7,600 to 6,300 years ago.

What gave it away was the wear. Deep, rounded grooves in the teeth that don't look like normal chewing damage. The team also found traces of arecoline, the compound in betel nut that gives it its effect. The study came out in Science Advances and Adam Brumm from Griffith University led it.

The part that surprised me is how far back this pushes things. Before this, the solid evidence for betel nut use only went back about 3,000 to 3,500 years. So that's a jump of twenty thousand years. If it holds up, it's the oldest known evidence anywhere of people using a drug as a regular habit.

The researchers also think some of it may have started as pain relief. Betel nut numbs the mouth, and these people had bad teeth. That makes sense to me. Whatever the reason, they kept doing it long enough to leave marks that lasted 25,000 years.

I like finds like this. Not a monument or a weapon, just two people and their habits.

Source: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/12/science/betel-nut-prehistoric-use