How did cannabis reach the New World

[tangent] serendipity
I had a flight from Narita, leaving just 30 minutes prior to the tsunami.
when I landed in Detroit [ 10-11 hours later] I had a VM to call my travel agent asap.
she was in tears not knowing if I made it out or not.

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I’m good dude. Really not as passionate about this as you. I applaud your search for info. though. I don’t have enough time on my hands for that trawl. You did all that on your phone?. That must have been way fiddly. I think when you go back searching that far in history though, modern theories can get a bit wild.

I just this week saw a BBC news report on the new lidar scans of buried Mayan settlements in Guatemala. Fascinating. They found hidden miles long causeways and inter-connected settlements on a scale previously uncovered by modern archaeological digs. If you can find that, I’m sure you’d find that interesting. It’s not necessary for archaeologists to spend all their time digging and unearthing so maybe they can do that for lost land links etc etc. Probably worth a look for you.

I’ve seen those Olmec statues up close. They’re amazing. I guess you could say they look African but I definitely would not say that’s because they’re African. I think a lot of central and South Americans have features which resemble features of people in South East Asia, like the Philipines. My aunty is El Salvadoran and works with lots of Philipinos. If they were all speaking hispanic I would just assume they were all from one hispanic country or another just as I would think they were all Phillipino if they were all speaking Philipino. I think the possibility exists that they all might be offended if they were told they all look the same though.

Anyway, atb with your search.

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Everyone knows the mummy coke was planted by a cop!

This is a fascinating conversation but futile in terms of definitive verifiable evidence of the path weed took in getting to the Western Hemisphere. We know so little about the Americas in general prior to colonial exploration. Massive civilizations are being discovered of which we had no idea of their existence. Someone mentioned the LIDAR discoveries in recent years - some of these discoveries show huge, previously unknown cities.

Time is the other aspect we modern humans underplay. In America, 250 years is viewed as ancient history. It’s been held that man has been in the Americas for ~12,000 years. Many discoveries in recent years have challenged these ideas, purportedly much older than what we’ve been taught. People have been migratory for millennia. It’s fair to assume some people from somewhere carried seeds considered invaluable.

Hemp has a multitude of uses, many of which would have been considered integral: rope, sails, fabric, clothes, seeds for cooking, oil from seeds, etc.

Fascinating stuff. Thanks for starting this thread.

Kev :call_me_hand:t4:

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Yeah, all on a phone lol. The research in Guatemala was written about in a book called The Lost City of The Monkey God. Great book. Goes into the LIDAR searches and what they found. Another " myth" turned true. This LIDAR tech is also helping to map the lost civilization in the Amazon, first discovered( by a European) by the British explorer Percy Fawcett. Another “myth”. The book is better than the movie, which was itself good. The Lost City of Z is the name.
But I digress, as none of this research has turned up any facts about Cannabis. I found a German author, Garcia de Orta that wrote about the uses of Cannabis in the 1500’s in India, and while reading that I did see another article, which I lost, which talked of the Central American natives saying blacks were the first explorers, but again, no cannabis talk. It will take pollen or dna testing to prove pre Colombian cannabis existed in the Americas, if indeed it did. Still a great subject. Lots of info to build theories, but not enough to prove them as yet. But I try like Hell lol. That is, after all, how theories are proven. Stubborn people never giving up on a belief that they feel in their bones is right.

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They weren’t all entirely unknown, just nobody believed the explorers accounts at the time of original discovery. When the Portuguese descended the Amazon, they talked about huge cities along its banks. When future explorers went back, they found nothing, and assumed it was a tale, when in fact the tales were true. The jungle, disease and the flooding Amazon had swallowed the evidence, and we are just now rediscovering it . For any of these discoveries to have come to light required that someone believed enough in a “myth” to go out and prove its truth. Where are all the Indiana Jones’s now?

Sad but true.

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Interesting. How long has this datura been in India and China? The Aztecs had drawings of a lighter skinned person called Viracocha that was a bringer of knowledge. Where was He from? They say he traveled back across the Great Lake to his home, promising to return someday.

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I’m no historian so I’ll take a amature guess a mouse swollowed a seed whole and jumped on a boat and the rest was history

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I can contribute, if it has not yet been said, that there were more people in the Amazon than in Europe, when the colonizer arrived here … Another recent finding is that the Amazon Biome is not the result of the evolution of the forest, only the As a result of indigenous management for thousands of years, archologists have discovered layers of organic soil, which is only capable of forming with the help of a human being …

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Terra pretta, right?

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Yes… yes, Terras Pretas de Índio (TPI) ( black Indian land), is the regional name in the Amazon for soils with dark surface horizons. Studies have shown that the origin of these horizons is anthropic (resulting from human action), caused mainly by the accumulation of organic waste and the use of fire in its carbonization.

Hug

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I’ve been interested in Terra Preta for years. I always wondered if it was an accident, or if they built the soil intentionally. Basically, they were farming the woods. Same here in NY. One of three trees were nut trees when Europeans came here, resulting in a massive stockpile of protein and fat for the winters, in addition to plentiful game. Unfortunately, most have been cut down for furniture, and no one replants. Sad. So much more food could be grown if we farmed the woods again.
@Gugumelo…the links in portuguese…is their a button i can hit to translate? Found this neat picture…

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Yes, I believe that it is enough to translate, this is how I am able to speak to you … I posted this material in Portuguese, made by Brazilians, I believe it has more credibility. :joy::joy:

The name of the management is “coivara”, it clears a part of the forest, sets it on fire, first plants corn and beans, pumpkin, when the land starts to grow weak, the cassava plant then leaves and turns into garbage, that is, all the leftovers of food, and seeds are thrown in this area, to make an orchard for the grandchildren to eat in the future.

It is an incredible management, thinking about feeding one or two generations of the future, that is why I live …

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There is a ton of speculation in this thread IMO. Personally I think Spain brought hemp to the Americas in the 15-16th century during the columbian exchange but it wasn’t used for smoking. Most of the plants from Asia and elsewhere that are now in America came originally during this time too and vice versa.

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hey @Upstate as I understand it wants to know if you have an option to translate the site?

luckily the site has an option to translate to english (en) in the upper right corner, but anyway I made the same link available in the english version here:

Another way would be to use google chrome which has already come with an integrated translator.

:om: :pray:

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Speculations okay in this thread.

I like discussions that make you Ponder.
There is no question that the accepted truth is that the Spanish( Chile first)or Portuguese (Brazil)introduced this plant. But who brought the psychoactive version? Or was it bred from hemp? That is open to speculation. Everybody’s guess is as good as the next one.

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Thanks for the help there. I probably wouldn’t have figured it out

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I love this thread . So much interesting info . :+1:

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I am going to travel a little, the colonizer, Portuguese or Spanish, came by boat, a trip of a few months, the salt can preserve the food, but most of them came alive, mainly chickens.

Corn had not been discovered, how were birds (chickens) fed? Could it be cannabis? Could it be rice? Soy?

That’s what came to me when I treated the chicken in the morning …

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@blendmedmedman @PilgrimProgress…this thread…

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"Some of the earliest evidence of hemp in North America is associated with the ancient Mound Builders of the Great Lakes and Mississippi Valley. Hundreds of clay pipes, some containing cannabis residue and wrapped in hemp cloth, were found in the so-called Death Mask mound of the Hopewell Mound Builders, who lived about 400 B.C.E in modern Ohio.

In his 1891 study, Prehistoric Textile Art of Eastern United States, Smithsonian Institute ethnologist W.H. Holmes describes the recovery of large pieces of hemp fabric at one site in Morgan County, Tennessee: the “friends of the dead deposited with the body not only the fabrics worn during life but a number of skeins of the fiber from which the fabrics were probably made. This fiber has been identified as that of the Cannabis sativa, or wild hemp.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/dispensingfreedom.com/2018/03/14/history-indigenous-cannabis-natives-explorers-colonists/amp/

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