No worries! If is hadn’t been such a shit year, that would be a funny joke. 
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You’ve misunderstood me, or at least, didn’t get my point.
Cannabis, the plant, has had for millenia at least three different uses:
- It is an oilseed plant. The seeds and oil are used for food, cooking, lubrication, heating, etc.
- It is a textile plant. The stalks of the plant are broken down into fibers which can be used for rope, yarn, cloth, etc.
- It is a medicinal plant. The leaves and buds can be smoked or otherwise prepared to use inherent psychoactive chemicals in the plant.
My point was that while most of the people here, and the bits of the article quoted by BoingBoing highlight the medicinal use possibility, it is also possible that the plants were grown and used for other purposes, including textile. Or growing it for multiple purposes, even.
The NatGeo article did go into that more than BoingBoing did, but given the known difficulties in distinguishing between bast textile fibers, I’m not necessarily convinced by the “no hemp textiles found” conclusion.
The fact that the full plant, not just the flower heads, were used as burial goods, also suggests to me that the full plant, not just the parts that get you high, were important to the deceased. To me, that suggests the fiber was important.
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This is where well all pretend that it was for ‘ritual purposes’; rather than because people probably enjoyed getting stoned out of their skulls just as much a few thousand years ago as they do today, right?
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I dunno, to me the fact that they cut all the good buds off and chucked the good rope/canvas-making parts in the ground with a dead body suggests the opposite. It’s interesting that hemp and linen fibres are hard to tell apart, but that fact in isolation doesn’t cast a huge amount of doubt on a scientific report from an expert who was there, in my opinion. Do you know more about this particular find, or the surrounding region, than is stated in the article and abstract?
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Exactly. How do they know it’s not hemp? I keep hearing that they are different plants…
I had always heard that cannabis and hemp were for most parts, very closely related. One of those sativa vs. indica kinds of things.
The fact that the root word for canvas (which is fabric made from hemp fibers) and cannabis are the same is to me kind of telling.
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grateful dead do you suppose?
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I’m not an expert, but I think hemp is C. sativa, the only difference being if it was selectively bread for psychoactivity or not.
After a few thousand years I imagine it would be hard to tell.
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Only 2000 years…people have been medicating way longer then that.
“A modern stoned age family, they had a yabba dabba dooby time, a dabba dooby time, they had a gay ol time.”
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I don’t see any reason to wait for my own death before cremating the shroud
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The second from the bottom is legit. Fred and Barney used to sell cigarettes…
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Let the scientists germinate them first, so they can make sure there’s enough for everyone.
Seriously though, scientists have got 2000 year old seeds to germinate before now.
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Does anyone else find the way this news is being presented a little odd? Not “Marijuana plants discovered in ancient burial,” instead it makes the human remains seem like a contaminant to be tossed aside. I know this person has been dead for a long, long time, but seriously…
Willie and Snoop will outlive us all.
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““extraordinary cache” of well-preserved plants” in other words, a stash.
i realize i’m posting in entirely the wrong place, but i don’t know where the right place is. i’m requesting that boingboing update its readers on the fate of kratom. many many things have happened. it’s still legal. orrin hatch (!!!) wrote the anti-ban letter that senators are signing. orrin hatch! is there someone i can bug about this?
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Try http://boingboing.net/s/ or you could PM one of the editors directly. Mark or Cory might be best as they’ve posted about it.
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thank you much! you’re my hero!
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De nada. Helping a mutant out.
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