A team of scientists showed for the first time that ancient nicotine residues could be detected on the tooth plaques of tobacco users.

Majang Tribe. The guy who smoked for a celebration, Kobown, Ethiopia. C: Eric Lafforgue

The research offers a new way of determining who consumes tobacco in the ancient world and can help to keep tobacco and other intoxicating plants in line with history.

It is easy to recognize a smoker or someone who breaks down on tobacco, and these are first understood by the stains on their teeth. With this in mind, a research team managed to extract nicotine from old tooth plaques in hopes of understanding the history of tobacco consumption.

Scientists were able to examine the dental plaques of eight people who died 6,000 to 300 years ago and succeeded in identifying nicotine residues for the first time.

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Using this new methodology, researchers hope to identify people consuming tobacco centuries ago.

"The ability to identify nicotine and other plant-based drugs on ancient dental plaques can help me answer long-standing questions about the consumption of intoxicants by old people," says Shannon Tushingham, an anthropologist at Washington State University.

"For example, it can be understood from this that all members of society use tobacco, or only women, only men, or adults only."

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The researchers collaborated with members of the Ohlone tribe in the San Francisco Bay to gain access to ancient ruins.

Using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry, researchers tested nicotine and caffeine and other plant-based drugs such as atropine, a muscle relaxant. Tests on a man buried with a pipe and an older woman gave positive results for nicotine.

"We can not make a comprehensive conclusion with this single case, but age, gender and tobacco use are very intriguing," says anthropologist Jelmer Eerkens.

"It was probably the age of childbearing, and it was probably a grandmother. This supports recent research suggesting that younger adult women in traditional societies are avoiding plant toxins such as nicotine to protect babies from harmful biochemicals, but older women can consume these toxic substances as they wish. "

Investigations into the traces of other intoxicating substances have not been identified in any sample, but the team hopes that the expected results will emerge in future tests.

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"We think that a variety of plant-based intoxicating chemicals can be detected in hundreds of years of dental plaques. These investigations are opening a whole new window, "he says.

Until now, it was based on the analysis of the spread of tobacco use in America, the examination of pipes, the discovery of burnt tobacco seeds and the analysis of hair and stool samples.

But because the teeth are so common in archaeological sites, analyzes to be done on the teeth can provide much more information than we would expect about tobacco use.

In the case of teeth, dental plaques adhere to the surfaces and become mineralized over time, protecting the wide range of substances in the mouth.

Understanding what an individual consumes requires testing only these mineralized materials.