12,000 Years of Cannabis: From Altai Mountain Nomads to the Endocannabinoid System
History of cannabis and the endocannabinoid system
A concise history tracing cannabis from 12,000-year-old Central Asian origins through ancient medicine, 19th-century rediscovery, 20th-century prohibition, and the molecular discoveries that finally explained why the plant works.
In the Turpan Basin of northwestern China, near the Flaming Mountains of the Xinjiang-Uighur autonomous region, archaeologists opened a 2,750-year-old tomb and found a man buried with approximately 800 grams of cannabis.
He was about 45 years old, likely a shaman, and of high social status. The cannabis was not hemp — not fiber, not rope, not food. Botanical and phytochemical analysis confirmed it had been cultivated specifically for elevated THC content. Male plant parts had been selectively removed because they produce less psychoactive resin. Whoever prepared this burial stash knew exactly what the plant did and wanted the strongest possible material.
That was 750 BCE. Cannabis had already been accompanying humans for more than 11,000 years by then.
In 2020, French psychiatrist Marc-Antoine Crocq published what may be the most elegant short history of that 12,000-year relationship — tracing the plant from Central Asian nomads through ancient pharmacies, Scythian rituals, Islamic scholars, Victorian physicians, twentieth-century prohibition, and finally to Raphael Mechoulam's laboratory in Israel, where science finally caught up with what humans had known empirically since the last ice age.
12,000 Years in One Timeline
The Ancient Pharmacy
Cannabis appears in the medical records of nearly every major ancient civilization — always for the same core indications: pain, inflammation, nausea, and anxiety. The consistency across cultures that had no contact with each other is striking.
The point is not that ancient people were sophisticated pharmacologists. They were not — they had no concept of receptors, molecules, or dose-response curves. The point is that the therapeutic profile they observed empirically — pain, inflammation, nausea, appetite, anxiety — maps almost exactly onto what we now know the endocannabinoid system regulates. They found the signal without knowing the mechanism. It took another 3,500 years to find the mechanism.
The Scythian Ritual and the Sanskrit Connection
One of the most vivid scenes in ancient historical writing comes from Herodotus, writing around 450 BCE. He describes Scythian post-burial purification rituals:
They set up three sticks leaning together, stretch woolen blankets over them, crawl underneath, and throw hemp seeds onto red-hot stones. The seeds produce such smoke that no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it. The Scythians, delighted (agamenoi), howl with pleasure.
This was not medicine. This was ritual — grief processing, purification, and, frankly, getting high together after burying the dead. The Scythians were Central Asian nomads, exactly the population that had been traveling with cannabis seeds for thousands of years.
Twenty-five centuries later, when William Devane isolated the brain's own cannabis-like molecule in Mechoulam's laboratory, the team needed a name. They chose anandamide — from the Sanskrit word ānanda (आनंद), meaning bliss, happiness, or pleasure. The same word that could describe what the Scythians experienced howling over their hot stones.
The naming was deliberate. The molecule that your brain produces to regulate mood, pain, and pleasure was named after the same experience that humans have been seeking from cannabis since prehistory. Neuroscience looped back to the Scythians.
West Meets East: The 19th Century Rediscovery
For centuries, European medicine had largely forgotten cannabis. It was the encounter with Islamic and Indian cultures that brought it back — through three remarkable individuals.
William Brooke O'Shaughnessy (1809-1889) was born in Limerick, Ireland, trained in medicine at Edinburgh, and relocated to Calcutta. There he encountered a plant whose intoxicating effects were "then unknown in Europe" — except among youth experimenting with "hasheesh" in Marseilles, where Napoleon's soldiers had brought it back from their Egyptian campaign.
O'Shaughnessy made a critical observation: the cannabis growing in India was fundamentally different from the hemp growing in Europe. Though the plants looked identical, the Indian varieties produced a "resinous secretion" — what we now know as THC-rich trichomes — that European hemp lacked, "likely attributable to climatic differences." He was the first Western physician to document the relationship between growing conditions and psychoactive potency.
He published his results in 1839, describing traditional Indian preparations: Gunjah (dried flowers), Bang (leaf preparations), and Majoon — a green, buttery electuary made by boiling cannabis in fat and adding sugar. The name derives from the Arabic Ma'jūn (kneaded). His publication introduced cannabis therapeutics to Western medicine and triggered the first golden age of medical cannabis in Europe.
Jacques-Joseph Moreau de Tours, a French psychiatrist and student of the great Esquirol, traveled the Middle East from 1836 to 1840. He encountered dawamesk — cannabis leaves and flowers boiled in butter, flavored with rose, jasmine, or honey — essentially the same preparation O'Shaughnessy had documented as majoon.
But Moreau had a different agenda. He was not looking for a medicine. He was looking for a model of madness.
He experimented with dawamesk himself, observing that it produced "pure bliss alongside idea disorganization and temporal distortions." He shared it with Parisian poets and novelists, including Théophile Gautier, creating what became the famous Club des Hashischins. But behind the literary glamour, Moreau was conducting the first systematic study of drug-induced altered states as a window into psychiatric illness.
He documented cannabis-induced psychoses and abulia (inability to make decisions or act) — observations that remain clinically relevant today in the study of cannabis-induced psychosis. Moreau de Tours was, in a sense, the first psychopharmacologist.
The First Golden Age — and Why It Ended
Myth vs. Reality
Emperor Shennong first documented cannabis as medicine in 2737 BCE, making it one of humanity's oldest medicines with nearly 5,000 years of continuous medical use.
The Shennong Bencao Jing was not written in 2737 BCE. It is attributed to the mythical emperor Shen Nong but was actually compiled during the Han dynasty (221 BCE - 220 CE) from older oral traditions. The '2737 BCE' date appears in popular histories but has no archaeological support. The oldest verified physical evidence of medicinal/psychoactive cannabis use is the Xinjiang shaman burial (~750 BCE) and the Ebers papyrus (~1500 BCE). Cannabis use is genuinely ancient — but the popular 5,000-year claim inflates the documented record.
The Evidence
Crocq notes the Shennong attribution is 'likely exaggerated' and dates the actual written BenCao to the Han dynasty. Archaeological and textual scholars place the compilation between 300 BCE and 200 CE.
Crocq (2020), Dialogues Clin Neurosci 22(3):223-228
The genuine golden age of Western medical cannabis came in the late 19th century. Queen Victoria used cannabis for menstrual pain. Empress Elisabeth (Sissi) of Austria used it for cough — and preferred it precisely because it was a natural remedy in an era when she distrusted synthetic medicines.
But the most important figure was J. Russell Reynolds, appointed in 1878 as Queen Victoria's household physician-in-ordinary. In 1890, he published a summary in The Lancet of more than 30 years of clinical experience with cannabis. His documented indications — facial neuralgia, migraine, dysmenorrhea, numbness and limb paresthesiae in gouty patients — are recognizably the same pain conditions that dominate modern medical cannabis registries, where pain syndromes account for 42.4% of all cases.
Reynolds also identified the two problems that would haunt cannabis medicine for the next 130 years:
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Standardization was impossible. "Hemp grown during different seasons, and in different places, varies in the amount that it contains of the therapeutic agent." He could not isolate the active ingredient — that would take until 1964.
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Dosing was unpredictable. Without knowing the active compound or its concentration, Reynolds could only use careful titration — tinctures with cautiously increased doses administered via drops on sugar or bread.
These problems remain partially unsolved today. The standardization challenge is exactly why pharmaceutical cannabinoids (Marinol, Sativex) were developed — and why whole-plant cannabis products vary so dramatically in quality and effect.
The Dark Century
The golden age ended not because cannabis stopped working but because better-characterized alternatives arrived (aspirin, barbiturates, opioids) and because political forces turned against the plant:
- 1937: The US Marihuana Tax Act effectively criminalized cannabis
- Within years: Cannabis was removed from the American pharmacopeia
- 1961: The UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs placed cannabis under Schedule IV — the strictest international control — alongside heroin
- 1970: The US declared cannabis Schedule I, defined as having "no accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse"
Crocq notes the irony: the UN placed cannabis — a substance with at least 3,500 years of documented therapeutic use — in the same category as heroin. The scheduling made cannabis research "practically impossible" in the United States for decades. Scientists could study heroin more easily than cannabis.
The Israeli Breakthrough
In 1964, a chemist who had survived the Holocaust as a child in Bulgaria changed everything. Raphael Mechoulam, working at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, obtained 5 kilograms of seized cannabis from the police — reportedly carrying it on a public bus — and set about separating its chemical components using column chromatography.
He and Yechiel Gaoni identified the structure of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol: the molecule that explained 12,000 years of human experience with cannabis.
To confirm they had the right compound, they fed cake containing the isolated THC to healthy volunteers — fellow researchers and their wives. The results were dramatic and personality-dependent: some laughed, some experienced panic attacks, some became unusually open in conversation. One researcher's wife reportedly talked non-stop for hours and then baked a cake, insisting the experience was wonderful.
Mechoulam's discovery was not just a chemical identification. It was the key that unlocked an entire biological system. Once you know the molecule, you can find the receptor. Once you find the receptor, you can find the body's own version of the molecule. The entire cascade — CB1 in 1990, anandamide in 1992, CB2 in 1993 — flows from that afternoon in the Weizmann Institute.
The System Revealed
The endocannabinoid system that emerged from Mechoulam's discovery has a unique feature that Crocq highlights: retrograde signaling. Unlike almost every other neurotransmitter system in the brain, endocannabinoid signals travel backward.
In conventional neurotransmission, a presynaptic neuron releases a chemical that activates the postsynaptic neuron. In the endocannabinoid system, it's reversed: the postsynaptic neuron produces anandamide or 2-AG, releases them backward across the synapse, and they act on CB1 receptors on the presynaptic terminal — turning down future neurotransmitter release.
This makes the endocannabinoid system a braking system for the brain. It doesn't initiate signals — it modulates them. It says "that's enough" to neurons that are firing too much. Pain signals, stress responses, inflammatory cascades — the endocannabinoid system regulates them all by providing retrograde feedback.
This is why cannabis affects so many different functions: pain, mood, appetite, memory, inflammation, sleep. It's not that cannabis is a wonder drug. It's that cannabis hijacks a system whose job is to regulate everything else.
And it's why the Scythians howled, why Helen's soldiers forgot their grief, why Queen Victoria's cramps eased, and why modern patients report relief from the same conditions documented on Assyrian clay tablets 3,000 years ago. One system. One plant. 12,000 years.
Where 12,000 Years Led
After all of that history — after Shennong and Herodotus and Pliny and O'Shaughnessy and Queen Victoria and Mechoulam — what does modern science actually confirm?
Crocq frames this as the central paradox of cannabis history. We have 12,000 years of human experience, 3,500 years of medical documentation, 60 years of molecular science, an entire endogenous signaling system named after the plant — and we can only confirm three therapeutic indications with high confidence. Not because the plant doesn't work, but because decades of prohibition made the research practically impossible.
The three confirmed indications — chronic pain, chemotherapy nausea, and MS spasticity — are, as Crocq notes, almost exactly the same conditions documented by Reynolds in 1890, by Pliny in 70 CE, and in the Chinese BenCao two millennia ago. Science has confirmed what empirical observation established thousands of years earlier — but it has not yet expanded much beyond it.
Key Takeaways
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Cite this study
Crocq, Marc-Antoine. (2020). History of cannabis and the endocannabinoid system. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 22(3), 223-228. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2020.22.3/mcrocq