A Scythian prince’s tomb in Siberia held a stash of cannabis seeds, and traces in hair

Roughly 1,000 cannabis seeds sat in a Siberian burial for about 2,800 years before archaeologists started counting them. Hair preserved in the same chamber now carries a chemical signal that points to the plant having been consumed, not merely buried.

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The grave is a princely tomb of the Scythians, the horse-riding people of the Eurasian steppe, in the Republic of Tyva in southern Siberia. A team led by Gino Caspari, who works at the University of Bern and the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany, described the finds in a paper in the journal Science called “Direct evidence for psychoactive cannabis use 2800 years ago.”

Tunnug 1, a mound built around sacrifice

The University of Bern names the site as the Tunnug 1 princely tomb, a burial of high-ranking members of Scythian society. It is not a new dig. Fieldwork there was written up in the journal Antiquity in October 2024, and the Max Planck Institute described one of the largest and earliest burial mounds on the Eurasian steppes, holding fragmented human and horse remains believed to have been sacrificed to honor an elite individual. Archaeology magazine later placed the find among its Top 10 discoveries of 2024.

Earlier work counted 18 horses deliberately placed on the mound. Later excavations added several dozen more sacrificed horses, along with scattered human bones.

The 2024 Antiquity paper, “A spectral cavalcade: Early Iron Age horse sacrifice at a royal tomb in southern Siberia,” listed Timur Sadykov, Jegor Blochin, William Taylor, Daria Fomicheva and Gino Caspari among its authors. Scythian-style artifacts and horse-riding equipment lay with the remains. The Max Planck write-up said the burial practices resemble those of the Late Bronze Age in Mongolia, which suggests deep roots in Inner Asian horse cultures, and that the origins of Scythian culture lie far to the east of the later heartlands in Eastern Europe.

Caspari said the burials were accompanied by extensive horse sacrifices and, most likely, human sacrifices as well. That is the setting in which the cannabis turned up, and it shapes how the researchers read it: as part of a funeral ritual staged for someone of rank, not as a stray crop that happened to blow into a grave.

Six radiocarbon dates place the seeds in the early eighth century B.C.

The team recovered approximately 1,000 cannabis seeds from the tomb and sent six individual seeds for radiocarbon dating. Combined with other dating evidence from the burial, the results put the deposit in the early eighth century B.C., which is where the figure of about 2,800 years comes from. The Bern release calls it the oldest directly dated archaeological evidence of cannabis used for its intoxicating properties.

The seeds themselves are modest evidence. The Bern release says they likely came from wild plants, and the researchers cannot say whether anyone cultivated the plant for its psychoactive effect. Caspari told ScienceDaily that the seeds show cannabis played an important role in the rituals surrounding the burial, which is a claim about ceremony rather than about farming or trade.

Cannabinol in the hair, and what it cannot show

The more unusual part of the Science paper is the hair. The author list runs to nine names, including Timur Sadykov, Daria Fomicheva, Jegor Blochin and Robert Spengler, and the paper appears in Science volume 394, issue 6824. Strands of hair preserved in the tomb’s central burial chamber were analyzed with high-resolution mass spectrometry and other techniques. Several samples gave clear chemical signals consistent with cannabinol, known as CBN, a compound that can form when THC oxidizes. Weaker signals matched the mass of THC itself. Caspari said the approach combines the analysis of plant remains with molecular traces in the human body, which is what lets the study move from “cannabis was present” toward “someone took it.”

The limits are stated plainly. The hair data cannot show how much was consumed, or whether the compounds entered the body by inhalation or by ingestion. Later Central Asian sites show cannabinoid residues on heated stones and inside vessels, which suggests inhalation, but nothing in the Tyva tomb settles the method.

Two larger questions remain open: how much THC the ancient plants contained, and whether people deliberately selected psychoactive varieties. The team has begun sequencing plant DNA, and Caspari said DNA preservation is excellent in this case, with the work expected to clarify how the crop was domesticated and how it spread. The ScienceDaily account of the study carries those details, and the sequencing results will show whether the Tunnug 1 plants were wild stock or something people had already begun to shape.

For now the claim rests on two independent lines of evidence in one grave: seeds dated by radiocarbon to the early eighth century B.C., and hair from the central chamber carrying a THC breakdown product. Neither line alone proves intoxication. Together they are what the Bern team calls direct evidence, and the weaker THC-mass signals in the hair are the detail other laboratories will most want to test.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.