0
0
Somewhere on the island of Sulawesi, in what is now Indonesia, a person with a bad tooth put a small, hard nut in their mouth and held it there. Then they did it again. And again. For years.
We know this because the nut left a mark. Scientists have now found traces of betel nut in human teeth that are up to 25,000 years old. If the finding holds, it is the oldest evidence we have of a human drug habit anywhere in the world.
But the most interesting part is not the date. It is the reason these people may have kept reaching for the nut, and what the nut was doing to them while they did.
What the Scientists Found in the Teeth
The study was published on 9 September 2026 in the journal Science Advances, led by archaeologist Adam Brumm of Griffith University in Australia, with researchers from Indonesia and the United States.
They looked at the teeth of two people who lived in South Sulawesi. One lived somewhere between 25,000 and 16,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age. The other lived much later, between about 7,600 and 6,300 years ago.
Both sets of teeth had something odd: deep, rounded grooves. The grooves did not match any wear pattern the team had seen in ancient teeth before. The shape told a story. These people had held a hard, round object, about 1 to 2 centimetres across, between their teeth, and sucked on it for long stretches of time. Not once. Over and over, for most of their lives.
Brumm told ABC News in Australia that when he saw the grooves, “I thought, immediately, betel nut is the most likely possibility.”
Then the team tested the idea. Chemical tests on the teeth found arecoline, the main active substance in betel nut. That is the part that turns a good guess into evidence.
What Is Betel Nut?
Betel nut is the seed of the areca palm. It is not really a nut, and it is not the same thing as the betel leaf, even though the two are often used together.
Today, most people who use it chew a “quid”: a piece of the seed wrapped in a betel leaf with a little slaked lime. The mix gives mild energy, a warm feeling, and sharper focus. It also stains the mouth red.
It is far more common than most people in the West realise. After alcohol, caffeine and nicotine, betel nut is the fourth most widely used mind-altering substance in the world. The researchers say about one in ten people alive today use it, hundreds of millions of people from India to the islands of the South Pacific.
In many of those places, it is not a secret vice. It is hospitality. It is offered to guests, shared at weddings, and passed between friends. That matters, and we will come back to it.
The Ice Age People Did Not Chew It. They Sucked It.
Here is a detail that is easy to miss. The grooves showed these ancient foragers were not chewing a modern quid. There was no leaf and no lime. They were holding the whole nut in their mouth and sucking on it.
So the team had a fair question to answer: does that even work? Would a whole nut sitting in a mouth release anything at all?
To find out, they soaked betel nuts in artificial saliva. Then they tested the liquid on frog egg cells that had been engineered to carry human brain receptors. The answer was yes. Saliva alone, given enough time, pulls out the main active substance. The researchers also add a fair caveat: the effect was probably milder than what people feel from a modern quid.
That is a very small, very patient kind of habit. No fire. No tools. Just a nut, a mouth, and time.
Did Betel Nut Start as Toothache Relief?
This is where the story turns human.
Both of these people had long-term tooth problems. And arecoline has pain-dulling properties. So the researchers suggest pain relief may have been one reason they kept at it.
It is worth being careful here. The team does not say toothache was the reason. Betel nut also brings energy and a mild lift, and people then, like people now, may have liked it for more than one reason. “May have” is the honest phrase.
But then comes the twist that is easy to read past.
The nut that eased the pain was also grinding the grooves. It was part of what was wearing the teeth down. As Brumm put it to ABC, “The more they sucked the nut for pain relief, the worse it damaged their teeth.”
Read that again slowly. The relief was making the ache worse. And the worse the ache got, the more they needed the relief. The researchers call it a cycle. Anyone who has ever had a habit they could not quite put down will recognise it at once.
How Much Older Is This Than We Thought?
A lot older. Written records of betel chewing in India and China go back at least 2,000 years. Before this study, the oldest physical evidence was about 3,500 years old.
If the older of the two Sulawesi people lived at the early end of their date range, that pushes the habit back by more than 20,000 years. Even at the late end, it is still well over 10,000 years earlier than anyone had shown.
An archaeologist who was not part of the study, Sofia Samper Carro of the Australian National University, told ABC that the finding “predates any published evidence by thousands of years.”
And the researchers think the practice is probably older still. Two people is a very small number. They were very likely not the first.
Brumm added something that stays with you: “There’s no human society today that doesn’t use drugs of some kind. But we just know so little about the deep antiquity of these practices.”
Is Betel Nut Harmful?
It is fair to ask, because hundreds of millions of people still use it. The World Health Organization’s cancer research agency classes areca nut as a cause of cancer in humans, and long-term use is strongly linked to mouth cancer. It is also habit-forming.
None of that is a reason to look down on anyone. For many families it is simply what their grandparents did, and what their grandparents’ grandparents did. The Sulawesi teeth suggest that line may run back further than anyone knew.
The Oldest Habit Is the Reaching
Step back from the chemistry for a moment, and look at what those two people left behind.
Not a tool. Not a painting. Not a grave good. The oldest habit we can trace in them is a person in pain, reaching for something that would make it hurt a little less. That is not a strange, ancient behaviour. That is Tuesday. It is the phone at 2am, the second drink, the fridge, the scroll. It is the body finding its own small ways to cope, and some of them work, and some of them wear a groove.
What is striking is how kind the oldest wisdom about this has always been. The most famous invitation ever spoken to hurting people did not start with a list of things to stop reaching for. It was spoken by a carpenter to anyone tired and carrying too much, and it offered them rest. Not a rule. A rest that does not cost you your teeth. That idea, that the ache itself is being met rather than scolded, is very old, and it has outlived every empire that heard it.
The foragers of Sulawesi never heard it. They had a nut, and it helped, and it hurt. Most of us are not so different. We reach, and we should. The only question worth asking is whether the thing we reach for is healing the ache or quietly deepening it.
What This Study Does and Does Not Show
- It shows that two people in Sulawesi held betel nuts in their mouths so often it carved grooves into their teeth, and that arecoline was present in those teeth.
- It suggests this may be the earliest known evidence of a habitual drug habit anywhere, up to 25,000 years ago.
- It suggests, but does not prove, that pain relief was one reason for the habit.
- It does not show how widespread the habit was, because only two people were studied.
That kind of honest line between what a study found and what the headlines say is always worth drawing. We tried to do the same with the kimchi and microplastics study, which turned out to be much narrower than the news made it sound.
Discussion Question
Every culture on earth seems to have something people reach for when life hurts. Do you think that reaching is a weakness we should grow out of, or one of the most human things about us? Tell us what you think in the comments.
Share This
1. Scientists found betel nut traces in teeth up to 25,000 years old. The saddest detail: the nut dulled their toothache while wearing their teeth down. Relief that made the pain worse. https://bgodinspired.com/?p=116035
2. The oldest drug habit we can trace in humans might not be about getting high at all. It might be a person with a bad tooth trying to hurt a little less. That hit me. https://bgodinspired.com/?p=116035
3. Ice Age people in Indonesia held betel nuts in their mouths so often it carved grooves into their teeth. The study even tested it on frog eggs with human brain receptors. Wild read: https://bgodinspired.com/?p=116035
Questions People Ask About Betel Nut
What is betel nut?
Betel nut is the seed of the areca palm, a tree grown across South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific. It is usually chewed wrapped in a betel leaf with slaked lime. Its main active substance, arecoline, gives mild energy, alertness and a warm feeling. After alcohol, caffeine and nicotine, it is the fourth most widely used mind-altering substance in the world, used by roughly one in ten people.
What is the oldest evidence of betel nut use?
The oldest evidence of betel nut use comes from the teeth of a person who lived in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, between 25,000 and 16,000 years ago. A study published in Science Advances in September 2026, led by Adam Brumm of Griffith University, found deep grooves worn into the teeth and traces of arecoline, the main active substance in betel nut. The previous oldest physical evidence was about 3,500 years old.
Did ancient people use betel nut for toothache?
Possibly. Both of the ancient Sulawesi people whose teeth were studied had long-term dental problems, and arecoline, the main active substance in betel nut, has pain-dulling properties. The researchers suggest pain relief may have been one reason for the habit, but they do not claim it was the only reason. They also note a cycle: sucking the nut eased pain while also wearing the teeth down, which could have worsened the pain.
How did scientists find betel nut in ancient teeth?
Scientists first noticed deep, rounded grooves in ancient teeth from Sulawesi, Indonesia, which showed a hard round object had been held and sucked for long periods. Chemical analysis then found arecoline, the main active substance in betel nut, in the teeth. The team also soaked betel nuts in artificial saliva and tested the liquid on frog egg cells carrying human brain receptors, showing that sucking a whole nut can release the active substance.
Is betel nut harmful to health?
Yes, long-term use carries real risks. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, classifies areca nut as a cause of cancer in humans, and regular chewing is strongly linked to mouth cancer. Betel nut is also habit-forming. In many cultures it is a traditional part of hospitality, so the health risks are an important reason for care rather than a reason to judge the people who use it.
