rtain 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, such as the collection of steppe tribes we now know under the collective title as Scythians, that cannabis was first spread around much of the ancient world. Linguistics have left a trace with this, as the first linguistic roots for the term ‘cannabis’, comes from an ancient Proto- Indo-European root word, “kanap”; the “an” from this root left traces in many modern terms for cannabis, such as French “chanvre”, German “hanf”, Indian “bhang”, Persian “bhanga”, Dutch “Canvas”, Greek “Kannabis,” and so on. Through their high mobility, these ancient nomadic horse riders spread the use of cannabis to numerous cultures, not only in name and application, but also with the religious and magical connotations that had grown around it. Evidence of this has left its traces in some of the world’s oldest existing religions, and cultures.
Indeed, in 2016 a slew of news articles have come out with Headlines like ‘Founders of Western Civilization Were Prehistoric Dope Dealers (New Scientist) ; ‘Was Marijuana the Original Cash Crop? ‘ (Men’s journal) ; ‘Surprising 5,000-Year-Old Cannabis Trade: Eurasian Steppe Nomads Were Earliest Pot Dealers’ (Ancient Origins) ; all stemming from a multi-authored academic Paper, Cannabis in Eurasia: origin of human use and Bronze Age trans-continental connections, (Tengwen, Wagner, Demske, Leipe, Tarasov, 2016), that was published in the journal Vegetation History and Archaeobotany* and which detailed the paramount role cannabis played in the trade, tradition, and spread of Indo-European Culture. So the above evidence regarding the role of cannabis in the origins of Western culture should not be underestimated.
The authors of The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture note that “Hemp has not only been recovered from sites in Romania but also from a Yamma burial at Gurbanesti (Maldova) where traces were found in a ‘censer’ (a shallow footed bowl believed to have been used in the burning of some aromatic substance). It has been found in a similar context from an early bronze age burial in the north Cau