The comments regarding assumptions are absurd, particularly when they speak of the Sea Peoples which automatically dismisses all three so called assumptions. Then understand that native copper moved from Lake Superior and elswhere including the Andes for over one thousand years.
Ignoring the collected evidence sitting in university basements does not make it so.
Metal was the prime commodity, but a sack of coca leaves or tobacco did not take up space or weight.
That makes the obvious conclusion obvious.
New World Drugs in Old World Mummies?
https://ahotcupofjoe.net/2019/05/new-world-drugs-in-old-world-mummies/
Disclaimer: This is a re-write from a previous article. I’ve expanded and revised a section where I was wrong–specifically with regard to the presence of the tropane alkaloid, cocaine in an African species of Erythroxylum. I’ve also updated the original article, removing that claim.
Many pseudoarchaeological claims center around so-called “out of place artifacts” (ooparts) that are often used as evidence for pre-Colombian contact with the Americas by just about any culture that didn’t come across the Bearing Sea land bridge. Among these claims is one that makes the rounds on the internet a few times a year, often in Facebook memes, which is that ancient Egyptians had trade routes with the Americas as early as the 21st Dynasty (~1000 BCE).
How the Claim Began
In 1992, Balabanova, Parsche, and Pirsig wrote a one-page paper in Naturewissenschaften called, “First identification of drugs in Egyptian mummies.”
What they described was the discovery of chemical signatures of THC, cocaine, and nicotine among the mummified remains of 9 individuals comprised of 7 heads severed from the bodies, and 2 mummies: 1 complete and 1 incomplete. They were all adults (3 female,6 male) and their remains dated to about 1000 BCE. Essentially, the authors used radioimmunoassay and gas chromatogoraphy/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). Both of these are the same methods used all over the world to test for drugs in live people. If you give a urine sample for a job, it’s likely that one or both of these methods would be used.
The drugs were found in the hair, soft tissues, and bone of the specimens in ways that defy an explanation other than consumption. In other words, being shipped with cocaine or sprayed with insecticide wasn’t enough to explain why the bones contained signatures of cocaine and nicotine. In fact, it wasn’t cocaine that was initially discovered, but benzoylecognine. This is the chemical left over in the body after a human metabolizes the cocaine. In all likelihood, they found the metabolite of nicotine as well, which is cotinine.
Parsche along with Nerlich then wrote a paper for the Fesenius’ Journal of Analytical Chemistry (1995) called “Presence of drugs in different tissues of an Egyptian mummy,” in which they examined a mummy dating to 950 BCE using the same techniques as Parsche did with Balabanova in 1992. In this bit of research, what Parsche and Nerlich discovered was that, while the THC was very probably inhaled, the nicotine and cocaine were ingested since their signatures were found in highest concentrations in the liver and intestines.
Balabanova then teamed up with 5 new researchers (Parsche and Parsig not among them) and ran the same tests on 71 more mummies excavated from the Christian Sayala (Egyptian Nubia) dating to between 600 to 1100 CE. Still well before the Columbus voyage to the Americas. They again found cocaine (in 79% of the individuals). They again tested bone and hair, so the concentrations in the livers and intestines would be unknown. However, there was a distinct inverse correlation between age of the individual and the concentration of cocaine. In other words, the highest concentrations were in the mummies of those that were the youngest at the time of death.
This would seem to correspond to what Parsche and Nerlich found, which is that the method of consumption was ingesting rather than smoking or inhalation. Children from 1-6 years of age are less likely to smoke or inhale a drug rater than ingest it by mouth. It’s also important to note that Parsche and Nerlich did not seem so eager to tie the nicotine and cocaine they found to New World origins.
Implications and Assumptions
The chief implication by the fringe crowd (and by Balabanova and others) is that the previously unthinkable must be true: ancient Egyptians traveled to the New World and brought back tobacco in the form of either Nicotiana rustica or N. tobacum and cocaine in the form of Erythroxylum coca or E. novogranatense.
This would be a wonderful and certainly newsworthy discovery if true! I know of no archaeologist that would be anything short of ecstatic to learn that this could be supported by evidence and this is precisely what Balabanova and a few of her colleagues genuinely thought they had.
But here’s the problem: for this explanation to be true, there are some not-too-insignificant assumptions that must also be true. In order accept that ancient Egyptians between 1000 BCE and 1100 CE traveled back and forth to South America, bringing back tobacco and coca leaves we must assume:
The Egyptians had sea-worthy boats
They didn’t find the journey significant enough to write about
There were no sources of THC, nicotine, or cocaine available from Africa, the Near East, or Asia, each of which is known to be traded with by Egypt.
There are certainly some other assumptions that could be included in this list, but these would seem to be the most significant.
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