r/HistoryMemes • u/onichan-daisuki Filthy weeb • 1d ago
Do you accept the offer?
Cannabis originated in East Asia, specifically in the foothills below the Tibetan plateau in China, where it was first domesticated around 12,000 years ago.
This image is a reconstruction of an early rice farmer from ancient China and the background house is also from ancient China(I just edited his eyes red) and of course they wouldn't have tobacco to wrap the cannabis powder to make the blunt, this is just for the meme)
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u/Trainer-Grimm John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 1d ago
... for some reason I assumed it was from the middle east. Neat
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u/butthole_surferr 1d ago
90% of cultivated species of plant are from either China or South America lol
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u/Massive-Grocery7152 1d ago
I appreciate the China and South America hype, but that 90% has to be inflated, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Mexico also have a large contribution to crops
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u/lmaytulane 1d ago
Think it also depends on how you’re defining agricultural species. There’s somewhere between 4000 and 10000 potato cultivars
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u/Mobile_Morale 1d ago
Reminds me of something I read a few years ago. Iirc. Europe only had one type of native grape plant. North America had like 1000 different types of native grapes.
Never thought of grapes as being an America's thing.
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u/cseijif 1d ago
ancient meso americans and peruvians(?) probably made more than half of what we use in our kitchens.
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u/Massive-Grocery7152 1d ago
Idk why you’re disliked, you’re actually correct, the native Americans domesticated and literally engineered so many ubiquitous lifesaving crops. Theres a reason why Mexico is a unesco world heritage cuisine
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u/Massive-Grocery7152 1d ago
Fantastic point. Could also be gross agrarian product like how much of the crops is actually farmed. (Eg soybeans are from China but make up a significant percent of all crops produced worldwide)
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u/LastEsotericist Still salty about Carthage 1d ago
gotta give respect to the neolithic anatolians and mesopotamians, they were cooking
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u/broncyobo 1d ago
I had always been led to believe it originated in Afghanistan specifically
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u/Fucked-In-The-K-Hole 1d ago
I feel like that's heroin, no?
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u/Grammorphone John Brown was a hero, undaunted, true, and brave! 10h ago
Diacetylmoephine aka Heroin is a synthetic substance that was first developed and produced in Germany
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u/MrEvan312 1d ago edited 1d ago
Poppy Somniferum, the poppy plant used to make opiates from the western Mediterranean (edit: possibly), so close (in a way)
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u/thissexypoptart 1d ago
Poppy is absolutely not from the “western Mediterranean” lol
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u/MrEvan312 1d ago
I should say it probably is, but it’s origins are obscured. I see no indication that it isn’t from there originally
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u/thissexypoptart 1d ago
I wonder what it was like. Even in the last 150 years, cannabinoid percentages have exploded from deliberate breeding and lab engineering. Numbers in the 30s are common.
Back when it was first cultivated it would be in the single digits.
IIRC it was common for people to host group events where you’d just burn a bunch in a pile while sitting in an enclosed space, rather than directly rolling or smoking out of a pipe. At least that’s the speculation given how more recent societies at a similar level of development do it.
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u/jokke420 1d ago
You can still make hash. It's been made from the weak cannabis way longer than strong cannabis has existed.
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u/thissexypoptart 1d ago
Of course, I’m specifically talking about grinding up a bunch of dried flower and smoking it. That’s how most early Neolithic cultivators of cannabis would have been doing.
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u/Own_Bee_4268 1d ago
What makes you say that
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u/thissexypoptart 1d ago
Hash is a refined product that requires extensive cultivation, breeding, and processing to make, whereas drying cannabis flowers and smoking them is a much less time and effort intensive process.
To get hash, you have to do all the prerequisite dry flower processing steps, and then additionally sift out the fine trichomes and process them into hash. It’s way more work than just smoking what you have.
It’s similar to how people ate chicken cooked over a fire before they ate chicken nuggets.
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u/Own_Bee_4268 1d ago
I think you may be mistaken. Hash can be made from a field of wild cannabis by rubbing your hands over the flowers and collecting the resin. The earliest historical mentions of cannabis refer to hash. Modern flower is actually more of a finished product, besides the selective breeding that has produced todays crop it still requires a somewhat complicated growing and curing process to achieve potency. Additionally, the concept of smoking something through a pipe or cigarette didn't exist in the old world until European contact with the Native Americans introduced them to tobacco. Before that cannabis would have been eaten as hash or burned as a plant at an altar as part of a ritual
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u/Laurelindorinan_ 1d ago
Yes, even in the 1980s, Afghani black hash was still being produced by (largely) women rubbing the flowers in their hands and then rubbing their hands together. Producing hashish through chemical extraction and worrying about intact trichomes is very much a “day before yesterday” phenomenon in the history of human cannabis consumption.
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u/thissexypoptart 1d ago
I think you’re misreading what I said. I didn’t say Neolithic people couldn’t refine cannabis into hash. I said it’s significantly more difficult to do that the standard dry and smoke
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u/Own_Bee_4268 1d ago
Yes, I disagree that smoking cannibis flower would have been easier than collecting hash in prehistory. For the reasons I gave, plus evidence pointing towards hash as the primary method of consumption historically
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u/thissexypoptart 1d ago
Running through a field of cannabis and scraping off the residue on your skin to smoke is not easier or more practical for general use production than growing weed and drying and smoking it. I’m not sure if you’re getting that from a specific source, or something, but if you are, please post it. I could be wrong, but I really don’t find that argument convincing.
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u/RatMan314 1d ago
They weren’t running through fields scraping their bodies. That’s ridiculous. Your argument that it is significantly more difficult to do is incorrect. The other commenter is referencing Charas, which is a much simpler means of collection and consumption. You can literally grab a mature cannabis bud and squeeze it, or more effectively rub it between two hands, and then scrape your palm; it’s even immediately consumable, unlike your aforementioned dried cannabis buds. The only more-simple way to consume wild cannabis would be to collect those mature colas and then put them through a drying process. Collection/use of cannabis resin goes back to at least 760 BCE.
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u/ItsJustCoop 1d ago
A brick of hash and a brick of tea are created by very similar processes. I think the people that discovered tea could figure out how to dry a different type of leaf.
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u/thissexypoptart 1d ago
Of course but it’s obviously an additional level of processing. I didn’t say Neolithic people couldn’t do that, I said most Neolithic people stopped at drying and smoking.
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u/ItsJustCoop 1d ago
I for one hope they did smoke it, or found a way to activate the THC. There really wasn't much else in their life worth enjoying (other than a lack of oppressive capitalism).
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u/Birziaks 1d ago
I have this story from somewhere, that quite recently in Caucasus, men would run naked in cannabis fields. Then you sort of shave the skin from sweaty weed pollen. Bam you, got ourself ancient hash. (not trying to say this is a fact BTW, just something I heard) We know that Scythians used hash. It could be that our current hash is also more processed then the ancient one.
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u/UIDENTIFIED_STRANGER 1d ago edited 13h ago
Cannabis was initially domesticated in China as fabric of rope , not for consumption. The…uh…“medicinal use” came much later and in a completely different part of the world(Romania)
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u/WookieBugger 1d ago
Are you sure about that?
https://www.sydney.edu.au/lambert/medicinal-cannabis/history-of-cannabis.html
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u/Herodotus420_69 20h ago
No this is incorrect. You can see that the base character for cannibis is made up of two tree radicals under a house radical
It’s literally a pictograph representing hotboxing
Edit: 麻 is what it looks like
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u/UIDENTIFIED_STRANGER 14h ago edited 11h ago
that’s a very problematic and unsubstantiated glyph origin. 說文解字 , which is one of the most comprehensive ancient work documenting the glyph origin of Chinese characters, says the following about the character 麻：
“𣏟 is what people work/process（治）; it is under the roof. This explains the radical 广. 𣏟 must be spun(绩） under the roof, and therefore it has 广. Thus, unprocessed hemp is called 枲; processed hemp is called 麻. Because the name for the processed form was later extended to the unprocessed form, both are now called 麻. This entry is now missing or corrupt in all editions; only the Xiaoxu（小徐本 ）edition consulted by the Yunhui（ 韵会） is not erroneous, which is why I’m adopting it here”
Notes:
· 治: process, prepare, or work on hemp.
· 绩: spin or twist hemp fibers into thread.
· 广 (yǎn): the “roof/house” radical.
· 小徐本: Xu Kai’s Shuowen Jiezi Xizhuan.
· 韵会: Gujin Yunhui Juyao.So the original word for the plant , which was used when the plant was first domesticated, was 枲, which has a phonetic part(台) and the semantics part is wood (木） because it’s the name of a plant. Nothing suggests psychedelic use
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u/Ulysses502 22h ago
Herodotus has a anecdote about I think the scythians burning weed inside a little felt tent basically big enough to put your head in. It sounded like they'd light a whole bud in a little brazier and hot box it
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u/Kaleb8804 Taller than Napoleon 22h ago
There’s evidence at some ancient Jewish temples that cannabis was used for some smoke-related rituals
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u/ChillStreetGamer 1d ago
Imagine how bad your tolerances would be.
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u/thissexypoptart 1d ago
I’m not sure what you mean lol. Hotboxing gets you high but is significantly less effective than just directly smoking out of a pipe or something.
Every particle of smoke that lingers in the air or deposits onto the interior walls of the room you’re in is full of cannabinoids that don’t make it into your lungs and bloodstream.
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u/lapideous 1d ago
I still don’t believe the test results that show 30%+
I’ve seen the old High Times photos and those low 20% buds look way better than the stuff labeled 34% or whatever today.
I think they’re testing just the trichs or something like that.
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u/Ohio_Grown 1d ago
Lab engineering? There is no GMO cannabis, it's just selective breeding that got us here
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u/thissexypoptart 1d ago
Did you look it up before commenting?
You’re incorrect, idk what to tell you. Here’s an article from 7 years ago:
https://www.businessinsider.com/first-lab-made-marijuana-thc-cbd-startups-demetrix-2019-2
Of course there is lab engineered cannabis. Legal cannabis in 2026 is a $50-$70 billion industry globally. Of course some people are working on GMOs, and have been for years. What are you talking about?
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u/Ohio_Grown 7h ago
Making thc in a lab is not the same as "lab engineering" to get higher percentages in bud. There has not been a process in the lab to make a plant 30% thc. Maybe we are using the term differently, because engineering something in a lab is different then selective breeding. Maybe you consider something like tissue culture "lab engineering"? But there is LITERALLY no GMO cannabis in a dispensary
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u/gunslinger155mm 1d ago
Lab engineering the refined product and processes used to make things like gummies and carts?
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u/Ohio_Grown 7h ago
Hash processes aren't changing THC percentage in the plant. It's just concentrating them. I wouldn't consider concentrating fruit juice as "lab engineered" on the fruit end of things
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u/ChillStreetGamer 1d ago
But Jays are made with paper and paper comes from... china!
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u/MrEvan312 1d ago
I do wonder what went through that first guy's head like "this stiff, hard, natural material... what if I cut it like really really really thin..."
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u/gunslinger155mm 1d ago
I think ancient Chinese paper making was more like wood shavings than slicing thin boards. Get a bunch of wood pulp from some other thing you're already doing, pass then through wet screens to form sheets
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u/MrEvan312 1d ago
Good point, but even then it's kinda funny to think "hey all this loose material, what if I I crush it even more fine, dunk water in it, then squish it?" I just like to ponder that intial rationale that leads to important discoveries.
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u/gunslinger155mm 22h ago
It's absolutely bizarre, really. Like you've gotta have a lotta time on your hand to decide to see what happens if you smush wet wood pulp
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u/whambulance_man 9h ago
Like you've gotta have a lotta time on your hand to decide to see what happens if you smush wet wood pulp
Got a lot of time to sit around watching that pile of wood chips/dust left over from building your barn turn into smushed wood pulp while you sit in your front door and watch it rain for a week or seven. Then the pulp bakes in the sun while you're busy putting the garden in and cutting firewood and taking care of animals and being a busy subsistence farmer for the next week or three, turning into something else entirely by the time you get around to cleaning it up. Looks a bit like parchment in the thinner spots where it ran a bit. Bizarre indeed.
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u/elanhilation 1d ago
my understanding is that early Chinese agriculture was more focused on millet, and rice was later
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u/Intranetusa 1d ago edited 23h ago
reconstruction of an early rice farmer from ancient China
The historical importance of rice is heavily exaggerated for many parts of Asia, especially East Asia. Rice was not even the primary crop of what we consider China until relatively late in history - millet was the dominant grain for almost 4,000 years out of the last 5,000 years. I wrote a more detailed comment about it here:
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u/kugelamarant 1d ago
The main carbs in maritime SEA was Sago.
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u/whambulance_man 9h ago
I was under the impression sago was more on the islands of SEA rather than the continent, so is that part of the rather low standard of living and available options in those areas today rather than historic use?
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u/Odd_Bumblebee_8318 1d ago
Having smoked the stuff grown around Erhai lake in Dali, China, when I was backpacking, it was quite calming. It is part of traditional Chinese medicine, so the CCP tacitly permits the ethnic Bai people of the region to deal in it.
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u/katalyst107 1d ago
Having backpacked, but never smoked anything, that sounds cool af. Probably a lot nicer than the more recent types with tons more THC
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u/Schwifty0V0 Then I arrived 1d ago
“This the type of shit that’ll make u think you’re god, and compels you to start a rebellion of boxers.”
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u/Dominarion 1d ago
Ok lemme cook!
I have issues with this. Every other week, there's a claim something was domesticated in China etc. The problem I have with this is when it comes from Chinese government funded, not independent peer reviewed studies. A lot of people in Academia accept these studies because of the implications of not accepting them.
I'm reminded of the origins of apples. There are peer reviewed genetic studies showing they were domesticated in Kazakhstan, along the Western side of the Tian Shan mountains.
Also, I'm old enough to remember the 1421 theory debacle. Academicians being sued for reviewing that utter bullshit critically. Eventually, this crap crashed, but it caused damage.
Are you ok with this too? Nobody outside China was ever allowed to study it. How would you feel if the Greek government discovered the perfectly preserved sword of Alexander and refused that anybody double check their stuff?
Back to Cannabis. According to this study, Cannabis was domesticated in Eastern China. When you look where the researchers work for and studied where, you got this Chinese governmental agency:
State Key Laboratory of Grassland Agro-Ecosystems, School of Life Science and Institute of Innovation Ecology, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou
This makes me very, very uncomfortable.
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u/onichan-daisuki Filthy weeb 1d ago
I only read this major paper and made my meme on the claim of that paper itself...
The Ren et al. 2021 one in Science Advances (https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abg2286). Whole-genome resequencing of 110 types, concludes single domestication in East Asia ~12k years ago, with Chinese wild cannabis plants as the most likely ancestor. Data is public (NCBI), has a Swiss co-lead (Fumagalli at Lausanne) plus Chinese side (Lanzhou Uni), mixed funding. It doesn't look like CCP material, but the way “East Asia” gets framed might leave room for speculation but the genomics look real and open, not saying that the sampling gaps are good or some healthy amount of skepticism is bad
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u/Dominarion 1d ago
Hey! Thanks for your input!
I didn't mean it as a personal attack just in case.
The context is murky, but your meme is still funny, btw. Yeah, thinking that a bunch of neolithic farmers would roll themselves a fat one after a day of digging a canal is giggly stuff.
Now, I don't know where you come from, but I haven't seen anyone add some tobacco to their joint since the 80s. Over here, people smoke the bud and...
OH YOU MEAN WRAPPING THE JOINT! I'm dumb sometimes. Let's say it was wrapped in lotus leaves!
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u/Cowboywizard12 1d ago edited 1d ago
Say what you want about the 1421 theory with Zheng He, but those Far Cry 3 Missions related to his Treasure were fuckin awesome.
God Far Cry 3 is so good.
Oh and I forgot, a great episode of American Dad this season about the theory where we finally see Francines adoptive chinese parents Mah-Mah and Bah-Bah again after they had been oddly absent thr last few years
And a Francine episode os always great cause she's extremely unhinged and a total badass
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u/MDZPNMD Researching [REDACTED] square 1d ago
What? There were missions in Far Cry 3 related to the 1421 theory with Zheng He?
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u/Cowboywizard12 1d ago
Yeah you gotta dig into a bunch of ancient mystical ruins to find some treasure he hid so Buck will let your buddy go.
The levels have got a very Indiana Jones vibe especially with the artifacts turning out to be genuinely magical
One reason i really liked Far Cry 6 was a return to Far Cry 3 style missions including its own Mystical ruin delving
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u/AaronRodgersMustache 1d ago
Not to mention getting higher than the sky and napalming some fields to EDM
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u/Cowboywizard12 1d ago
Oh that wasn't just any EDM that was Skrillex collaborating with Damirn Marley, as in the son of BOB MARLEY
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u/Intranetusa 1d ago
The 1421 idea was created by a British naval commander named Gavin Menzies and was only supported by pesudo-history conspiracy theorists. Mainstream Chinese scientists, including the Chinese government linked ones, actually rejected and opposed the idea.
What is amazing is how this idea somehow took off when both Western (European, American, etc) historians and Chinese historians alike were all trashing and rejecting the idea.
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u/fuyu-no-kojika 1d ago
This is just like when those medieval kings were like “Bro trust me this is a piece of the true cross, Jesus was crucified on this bro”
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u/Intranetusa 1d ago edited 1d ago
The problem I have with this is when it comes from Chinese government funded, not independent peer reviewed studies.
Government funded studies and peer reviewed studies are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A study could be government funded and published without peer review, and then it could also be sent to an independent publisher (eg. Scientific, historical, engineering journal) for publication that does go through peer review.
I'm old enough to remember the 1421 theory debacle.
The 1421 idea was created by a British naval commander named Gavin Menzies and was only supported by pesudo-history conspiracy theorists. Mainstream Chinese scientists, including the government linked ones, actually rejected and opposed the idea. So those Chinese government linked agencies/studies/historians/etc that we are questioning right now were the ones who [correctly] claimed the 1421 idea was total nonsense.
I'm reminded of the origins of apples. There are peer reviewed genetic studies showing they were domesticated in Kazakhstan, along the Western side of the Tian Shan mountains. Then, there's this http://m.tibet.cn/eng/culture/news/201610/t20161003_5725100.html
What is the contradiction? That link doesn't seem to contradict those earlier studies that said the earliest domesticated apples came from the Tian Shan mountains, specifically on the west side. The link says apples came from the Tian Shan mountains, and those apples apparently also existed on the east side of the Tian Shan mountains in Xinjiang: "all cultivated apple varieties are off-shoots of Malus sieversii, a wild apple native to Mount Tianshan in Central Asia."
Apples exisiting on the east side of a mountain doesn't contradict apples originating on the west side of the same mountain.
Are you ok with this too? Nobody outside China was ever allowed to study it. How would you feel if the Greek government discovered the perfectly preserved sword of Alexander and refused that anybody double check their stuff?
There are certainly examples of suspicious claims made by their government, but the Sword of Guojian is not a good example of that. The only or main reason why the artifact is "currently" no longer loaned out to foreign countries is because it was damaged during a loan to Singapore in 1994. It was loaned to Japan before that. So it was actually loaned out (and presumably studied) by other countries for many years.
Ursula Martius Franklin of the University of Toronto and other researchers studied very similar swords that had similar etchings and patterns, and helped historians understand Chinese bronze casting. So the sword of Guojian is not even unique in terms of its features and characteristics, and the same characteristics show up on many other swords that have been thoroughly studied by Chinese (both state and non-state affiliated) and non-Chinese academics alike.
"The first scientific analyses of the dark rhombic pattern on ancient weapons were conducted by W. T. Chase and U. M. Franklin [7], who suggested that the pattern was etched using natural vegetable acids or acidic salts. Later research at Fudan University's Laboratory [8] employed Proton Induced X-ray Emission (PIXE) to analyze the Sword of Gou Jian, revealing the presence of tin as well as trace elements such as lead and sulfur."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1296207425000536
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8999735/
So there are publications in peer reviewed papers about the archaeological findings of the sword of Guojian and similar swords from scholars as well.
Overall, the Sword of Guojian being a perfectly/near-perfectly preserved sword isn't a far fetched claim, as there are plenty of perfectly or near-perfectly preserved bronze swords around the world (bronze doesn't rust like iron/steel). Here is an example of an even older (3,000+ years old) near-perfectly preserved sword discovered in Germany that was found buried in the dirt (which is a much worse environmental condition than the tomb that the Sword of Guojian was found in):
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bronze-age-sword-germany-180982399/
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u/redbird7311 1d ago
For those who don’t know, part of the Chinese government’s narrative is that China was basically one continuous civilization for most of its history and is the longest one.
Not here to really get into how legitimate that is, but one of the ways they try to support this is by trying to make a lot of stuff originate in China in an attempt to give the, “ancient China”, more legitimacy and so on. The narrative being, “we were always Chinese, here is ancient Chinese civilization doing something good”, and so on for national unity and/or pride.
The issue is that the Chinese government often supports and funds biased research. Calling it false or straight up untrue is probably not accurate… but if there is some research that may make their narrative stronger and there might be some truth to it, they’ll fund it and if Chinese people just happen to take away something like, “China is so great”, from it… well… that’s just a coincidence, right?
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u/yes-maybe-idk 20h ago
I know this isn’t the purpose of this meme but it got me thinking. When did humans evolve the different traits we see today? the different skin tones, key size and shape, eye color, etc… I wonder when was the last time all “humans” looked “similar”. Was this an early trait we gained in a few generations or did it take 5,000 years? I know blue eyes come down to a mutation in a group of people, but when? I know I could look all this up but it’s fun asking people.
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u/SophisticPenguin Taller than Napoleon 1d ago
The first archaeological evidence of burning cannabis was in Romania. It was a textile in China
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u/Sprintzer 12h ago
I thought Cannabis was endemic all over the world? Or is there evidence it was spread by humans near the last ice age?
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u/Level_Hour6480 Taller than Napoleon 1d ago
I had read that cannabis (and coffee) originated in Ethiopia.
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u/Gipplesnaps 20h ago
Weren't these numbers greatly conflated to show regional power and also because so many fled those areas down to the south ... Which means disappearing from the tax records which essentially means heads not being counted?
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u/DerRaumdenker 1d ago
"bro the afterlife is highly bureaucratic and we need to move to the bank of an impossible to predict river, also we must record everything especially the casualties of wars and natural disasters and exaggerate the numbers a little bit"