Not new but interesting i thought.
https://www.alternet.org/drugs/ancient-marijuana-burial-shroud-uncovered-silk-road-desert-oasis
this is really funny - I’m sure his friends were like “we love you buddy but now we need these flowers more than you do!” 
The plants were lying flat on the man’s body, meaning they had been fresh when harvested in the area. Also, most of the flowering buds—interestingly, all females—had been collected, enabling the archeologists to determine that the burial had occurred in late summer, when the plants would have been mature.
That’s amazing though - visible trichomes on 2,500 year-old cannabis! Archeology is cool.
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@Muleskinner You might like this one also.
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The shaman’s grave! The article doesn’t mention it but Ethan Russo and his team tried to germinate his seeds and failed. This is also a cool story - 14-year-old girl in ancient Israel:
In an archeologically rich area of central Israel, Zias found another clue. While excavating a tomb from the late Roman period in the town of Beit Shemesh 10 years ago, he found the skeleton of a 14-year-old girl who died in childbirth around AD 390. On her stomach was a fleck of a burnt brownish-black substance.
“I thought it was incense,” Zias said. But when he had it analyzed by police and chemists at Hebrew University, it turned out to be a seven-gram mixture of hashish, dried seeds, fruit and common reeds.
Seven glass vessels containing traces of the drug were found near the skeleton. She probably used them to inhale the smoky cocktail to aid her delivery.
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Of course humans used drugs for recreation in antiquity. Why would we expect them to sit and stare at their walls and campfires day after day sober? Why would they? We wouldn’t do that now. Ha! Ha! 
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I see the resemblance.
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OK, here’s some ancient Chinese Empire hemp armor
Here is an Egyptian recipe for anti-inflammatory cannabis ointment, of course written on hemp paper:
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not exactly antiquity but very cool - one of the first US 10-dollar bills featured hemp harvesting on the back:
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In the second quarter of the first millennium B.C., the “word qunnabu (qunapy, qunubu, qunbu) begins to turn up as for a source of oil, fiber and medicine “ (Barber 1989). In our own time, numerous scholars have come to acknowledge qunubu as an early reference to cannabis. “It is said that the Assyrians used hemp as incense in the seventh and eight century before Christ and called it ‘Qunubu’” (Schultes & Hoffman 1979).
Further, the pioneering research of etymologist Sula Benet led to the claim that “The ritual use of hemp as well as the name, cannabis… originated in the Ancient Near East” (Benet 1975). Benet’s research is in agreement with that of the earlier German researcher Immanuel Low, who also regarded the ancient Near East as the location from where the modern name cannabis was derived. (Low 1925; reprinted 1967) This ancient Assyrian name qu-nu-bu, is the phonetic equivalent of the ancient Hebrew name for hemp, q’aneh-bosm and the strong connections between the two can be seen in the similar ways both Mesopotamian and Hebrew worshipers utilized the plant.
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Familiar with the stoned ape theory?
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I am not. Apes consumed weed, and philosophized themselves into humans?!?
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Terence McKenna is a great joy to read!
“Stoned ape” theory of human evolution
In his book Food of the Gods, McKenna proposed that the transformation from humans’ early ancestors Homo erectus to the species Homo sapiens mainly had to do with the addition of the mushroom Psilocybe cubensis in its diet,[25][70][71] an event that according to his theory took place in about 100,000 BCE (which is when he believed that the species diverged from the Homo genus).[21][72] McKenna based his theory on the main effects, or alleged effects, produced by the mushroom[3] while citing studies by Roland Fischer et al. from the late 1960s to early 1970s.[73][74]
McKenna stated that due to the desertification of the African continent at that time, human forerunners were forced from the increasingly shrinking tropical canopy in search of new food sources.[6] He believed they would have been following large herds of wild cattle whose dung harbored the insects that, he proposed, were undoubtedly part of their new diet, and would have spotted and started eating Psilocybe cubensis, a dung-loving mushroom often found growing out of cowpats.[6][7][42][75]
Psilocybe cubensis: the psilocybin-containing mushroom central to McKenna’s “stoned ape” theory of human evolution.
McKenna’s hypothesis was that low doses of psilocybin improve visual acuity, meaning that the presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack hunting primates caused the individuals who were consuming psilocybin mushrooms to be better hunters than those who were not, resulting in an increased food supply and in turn a higher rate of reproductive success.[3][7][25][42] Then at slightly higher doses, he contended, the mushroom acts to sexually arouse, leading to a higher level of attention, more energy in the organism, and potential erection in the males,[3][7] rendering it even more evolutionarily beneficial, as it would result in more offspring.[25][42][71] At even higher doses, McKenna proposed that the mushroom would have acted to “dissolve boundaries,” promoting community bonding and group sexual activities.[12][42] Consequently, there would be a mixing of genes, greater genetic diversity, and a communal sense of responsibility for the group offspring.[76] At these higher doses, McKenna also argued that psilocybin would be triggering activity in the “language-forming region of the brain”, manifesting as music and visions,[3] thus catalyzing the emergence of language in early hominids by expanding “their arboreally evolved repertoire of troop signals.”[7][25] He also pointed out that psilocybin would dissolve the ego and “religious concerns would be at the forefront of the tribe’s consciousness, simply because of the power and strangeness of the experience itself.”[42][76]
Therefore, according to McKenna, access to and ingestion of mushrooms was an evolutionary advantage to humans’ omnivorous hunter-gatherer ancestors,[25][75] also providing humanities first religious impulse.[75][77] He believed that psilocybin mushrooms were the “evolutionary catalyst”[3] from which language, projective imagination, the arts, religion, philosophy, science, and all of human culture sprang.[7][8][26][75]
Later on, this idea was given the name “The ‘Stoned Ape’ Hypothesis.”[42][70]
McKenna’s “stoned ape” theory has not received attention from the scientific community and has been criticized for a relative lack of citation to any of the paleoanthropological evidence informing our understanding of human origins. His ideas regarding psilocybin and visual acuity have been criticized by suggesting he misrepresented Fischer et al., who published studies about visual perception in terms of various specific parameters, not acuity. Criticism has also been expressed due to the fact that in a separate study on psilocybin induced transformation of visual space Fischer et al. stated that psilocybin “may not be conducive to the survival of the organism”. There is also a lack of scientific evidence that psilocybin increases sexual arousal, and even if it does, it does not necessarily entail an evolutionary advantage.[78] Others have pointed to civilisations such as the Aztecs, who used psychedelic mushrooms (at least among the Priestly class), that didn’t reflect McKenna’s model of how psychedelic-using cultures would behave, for example, by carrying out human sacrifice.[12] Although, it has been noted that psilocybin usage by the Aztec civilisation is far removed from the type of usage on which McKenna was speculating.[42] There are also examples of Amazonian tribes such as the Jivaro and the Yanomami who use ayahuasca ceremoniously and who are known to engage in violent behaviour. This, it has been argued, indicates the use of psychedelic plants does not necessarily suppress the ego and create harmonious societies.[42]
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This is a neat article on Hindu and Rastafari cannabis use.
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