in this train of thought. In his The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence, the late Carl Sagan also speculated that early man may have begun the agricultural age by first planting hemp. Sagan used the pygmies from southwest Africa to demonstrate his hypothesis; the pygmies had been basically hunters and gatherers until they began planting hemp which they used for religious purposes (Sagan 1977). More recently Entheobotanist Christian Ratsch explained:
No other plant has been with humans as long as hemp. It is most certainly one of humanity’s oldest cultural objects. Wherever it was known, it was considered a functional, healing, inebriating, and aphrodisiac plant. Through the centuries, myths have arisen about this mysterious plant and its divine powers. Entire generations have revered it as sacred…. The power of hemp has been praised in hymns and prayers. (Ratsch 1997)
Based on collected archaeological evidence, we can see that Cannabis has been used for its resinous psychoactive properties for more than 5 thousand years. The late archaeologist Andrew Sherratt of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, pointed to the use of cannabis incenses at a gravesite of a group known as the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the Kurgans, who occupied what is now Romania 5,500 years ago. The discovery of a smoking-cup which contained remnants of charred hemp seeds at the site documents that at 3,500 years before Christ humanity had already been using cannabis for religious purposes for millennia. (Sherratt, 1995)
In Incense and Poison Ordeals in the Ancient Orient, Alan Godbey felt that in such immolation of psychoactive plants, we may find the Genesis of the concept of “divine plants”:
As to the antiquity and genesis of such practices, it is to be recognized…that they began when the primeval savage discovered that the smoke of his cavern fire sometimes produced queer physiological effects. First reverencing these moods of his fire, he was not long in discovering that they were manifested only when certain weeds or sticks were included in his stock of fuel. After finding out which ones were responsible, he took to praying to these kind gods for more beautiful visions of the unseen world, or for more fervid inspiration… So one group of “animate and divine plants,” … results from the most primitive empiricism, because of purely objective or concrete experiences… (Godbey, 1930)
These same people who were the first to burn cannabis were also the first to domesticate the horse, an act of domestication first accomplished it is believed, with hemp ropes. As Mark Merlin, Professor of Botany at the University of Hawai’i has noted:
The crucial relationship between horse and human rider originated in the Sredni Stog culture which flourished in the Ukraine 6,000 years ago… The origin of horse riding was the first significant innovation in human land transport predating the invention of the wheel, and hemp fibers may have played an important role in this crucial invention of horse riding. (Merlin, 2003)
In the Discover article ‘First to Ride’,(the appropriately named) William Speed Weed, interviews archaeologist Sandra Olsen, who also makes reference to the utilization of hemp in the domestication of the horse, a pivotal and evolutionary step for ancient man:
“Prior to horseback riding, most people carried all their cargo on their shoulders, or they were restricted to using boats along rivers and coastlines,” says Olsen, an archaeologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. “Horses were swift of foot, could easily support one or two human passengers, carry heavy loads, and survive on very poor quality vegetation or fodder. They were our first form of rapid transit.”
“They probably had a simple bridle made of hide or hemp,” she says, “drawing a little schematic of a rope looped around the front teeth of a horse’s skull. They might also have had lassos, whips, tethers, and hobbles of the same material.” (Weed, 2002)
Thus it is a widely held view that it was with their nomadic horse riding descendants, su