When did humans start experimenting with alcohol and drugs?

By Nicholas R. Longrich, Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology and Paleontology, University of Bath

Humans constantly alter the world. We fire fields, turn forests into farms, and breed plants and animals. But humans don’t just reshape our external world – we engineer our internal worlds, and reshape our minds.

One way we do this is by upgrading our mental “software”, so to speak, with myths, religion, philosophy and psychology. The other is to change our mental hardware – our brains. And we do that with chemistry.

Today, humans use thousands of psychoactive compounds to alter our experience of the world. Many derive from plants and fungi, others we manufacture. Some,…

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