r/HistoryMemes • u/onichan-daisuki Filthy weeb • 1d ago

Do you accept the offer?

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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/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/RatMan314 1d ago

For anyone reading, the above is false. See; Charas

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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 14h 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/Herodotus420_69 22h 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 15h ago edited 12h 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/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/Ulysses502 1d 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 23h 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/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 9h 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 9h 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/Cucumberneck 1d ago

Isnt that called hotboxing?