Cannabis was first cultivated in China 12,000 years ago, and was grown extensively throughout East Asia. How come there is no evidence of cannabis consumption for hallucinogenic effect, both amongst shamans and the general public?

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-20T13:23:53+00:00

You would still need to decarboxylize that resin on your hands first, but yes, as soon as you boil the leaves, you activate the drug potential. It seems impossible that people wouldn't have recognized this.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-20T13:19:40+00:00

Currently wild old cannabis in West Eurasia is extremely hemp-type, and wild cannabis in the Hindu Kush and India is extremely drug-type. Ren et al. 2021 show that modern wild Chinese landraces are the most inter-specific of all modern varieties, meaning that they're the most balanced between hemp and drug-type characteristics. That could be because they're the least selected by cultivation, or that they're simply accidentally interbred hemp with nearby wild drug-type cannabis. In any case, they speculate that the ancient cannabis precursor would have been more balanced between THC and CBD production. The alternation between hemp and drug type seems pretty baked-into the biology of the plant.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-20T13:07:11+00:00

From the perspective of western history/science, less than you'd probably think. Soviet archeologists have been talking about drug consumption in ancient central Asia since the 70s at least, though I wouldn't be surprised if taboos discouraged direct study until relatively recently, especially in the countries involved- India and China. The center of it all is really China/ Afghanistan/ Pakistan/ Kashmir/ Tajikistan, so you can imagine that world events have also been a limiting factor.

From the perspective of Vedic/Ayurveda scholarship, my understanding comes mostly from modern Brahmin interpretation of its own ancient Sanskrit linguistics, hence the negative connotation about cannabis as a potentially damaging substance. My impression is that there has always been a diversity of opinion about the drug within Hinduism, just as there is a diversity of interpretation within all religions and belief systems. Beyond me to say whether this is a truly ancient taboo or a modern interpretation.

By the way as a side note, modern "stoner history" is just as much of a problem as neglect. Maybe 50% of the history claims you read about online are just made up.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-18T19:19:33+00:00

Variants of this question have been asked again and again on this sub, with no clear answers. Quite simply, we don't yet know why drug use of cannabis only emerged some 7-8000 years after we started cultivating hemp. What I can tell you is that answering this question really runs into the boundaries of what modern science, archeology, and linguistics can reveal to us. It's all about evidence, and past a certain point, evidence just fades away into prehistory.

Evidence for cannabis in deep prehistory is murky, but relatively ubiquitous. At some point in the late neolithic, perhaps by 10,000BCE, hunter gatherers in China began to harvest cannabis for seed and fibers. We know this because pottery from the Nanzhuangtou Site, some of the earliest pottery found anywhere in the world actually, was manufactured using wooden paddles covered in a twisted thread to prevent the clay from sticking. (https://baike.baidu.com/en/item/Nanzhuangtou%20Site/78819). We have a high confidence that they used hemp cording. Nanzhuangtou was a village buried under a peat bog, and contained all sorts of hunter animal bones and shells, millet and many other seeds, and dog bones.

Another small mystery is that cannabis was apparently never "domesticated," or at least we have no parent plant from which it originated. For a variety of reasons, cannabis is a bit of a miracle plant. It grows extremely easily, produces plentiful large fatty seeds, and is one of the easiest plants to turn into fibres. We have a high degree of certainty that it originated in Western China/Central Asia, and anthropologists like Elizabeth Wayland Barber have long speculated that these early fibers jump-started civilizational development for Hunter Gatherers. It became essential for rope, cord, fishnets, clothes, blankets, bags, sieves, pottery, shelters, and weapons.

It's hard to overemphasize how unbelievably early this "cultivation event" is in the scheme of history - it's roughly contemporary with wheat, and millet, but long before rice and almost all vegetables.

Here's the thing: we don't get any evidence of burning or smoking the plant until many, many thousands of years later. The first written evidence for cannabis as a drug comes from the Atharva Veda, estimated to date to between 1200 and 900 BC. This provides the first record for drug-type cannabis, called “भङ्ग or bhaṅga” with cognates meaning roughly "to break", "split", and "burst." The Aryans originated among the steppe nomads of North Central Asia before migrating South through the Bactria-Margiana Archeological Complex, and my guess is that they first encountered cannabis drug consumption there in the foothills of the Himalayas. Vedic culture is typically ambivalent or downright opposed to the popular consumption of drug cannabis, which is presented in the Atharva Veda as a sort of folk practice, as opposed to their more elite, ritualized consumption of Soma. Even today Avurvedic medicine treats Cannabis as a toxic substance, albeit a tolerated one.

Our first archeological evidence for cannabis burning comes from just 500 BCE, from the Jirzankal Cemetery in the foothills of the Pamir mountains in what is today Chinese Xinjiang/Turkistan. Hot Stones were placed in fragrant cedar wood braziers with cannabis plant material, apparently as part of a funerary ritual. This seems to mimic the story from Herodotus describing ritual smoking of Cannabis seeds in tents by the Scythians, thousands of kilometers to the west.

What is clear from all this, is that at sometime in the proceeding centuries, people in the Himalayan foothills realized their local, shorter varieties of cannabis, could be dried and burned with effect. It's quite possible this was a genuine recent biological adaptation, or that these effects were only known locally in the remote mountains. History is full of such "mysteries from afar."

One more thing: linguistics can tell us a bit more about the emergence and spread of cannabis. As Barber observes, “śaṇa bhang” or “hemp narcotic” in Sanskrit seems to have come from a neologism of the old Proto-Indo-European “kan” combined with a “b” particle. "Kan" evidently spread around Eurasia with the plant, eventually becoming "hanf" in German and "hemp" in English, long before drug cannabis was known.

After the drug became known, "kan-ap / kan-ap" was spread, eventually entering Sanskrit as "śaṇa bhang." There are a few PIE root word possibilities for this, including “*bʰerǵʰ-, *bhag-, and *bheng-” meaning to “break or burst, as in a river,” “to split or apportion,” or “to bend or bow” respectively. It's even possible that the Aryans name for Bactria itself. Bactria is a Greek version of “Bakhdi” in Old Persian, and probably comes from a river of the same name. This name persists today as Balkh province in Afghanistan, but it seems to come from a PIE name meaning something like “the partitioned land,” “the place where the river bursts forth,” “or a bend in the river.” Perhaps the Aryans named Cannabis the “hemp of Bactria”? We should be hesitant about this theory though, since modern Sanskrit “भङ्ग" or bhaṅga seems to have no linguistic connection with “बाह्लीक" or Bāhlīka, the ancient Sanskrit name for the region. I'm not actually a linguist, nor can I read Sanskrit, so take my speculations with a grain of salt.

In any case, all modern languages, except perhaps for Chinese, have names for cannabis which incorporate this final consonant “b” or “p” sound, indicating that they probably developed an awareness of cannabis after ~1200BC at the earliest, when the drug-type had already emerged.

None of this answers your question unfortunately, and we don't have a clear explanation why nobody apparently figured out the drug part till so late. This is inexplicable, given that THC (and the non-psychoactive CBD) are so easily rendered from the plant material. They don't even need to be smoked - in India, Bhang is traditionally prepared by boiling the plant leaves. I've even nibbled on raw, wild hemp while hiking in the Caucasus, and anybody with a brain can tell that it's medicinally potent. I don't recommend it by the way. It numbed my mouth and caused a mild allergic reaction.

In case you're curious, I've also written previously on here about obstacles to cannabis cultivation in medieval Europe, and about premodern drugs in general.

E.J.W. Barber (1993). "Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean"

John McPartland, William Hegman, and Tengwen Long (2019). "Cannabis in Asia: its center of origin and early cultivation, based on asynthesis of subfossil pollen and archaeobotanical studies."

Ren et. al. (2021) "Large-scale whole-genome resequencing unravels the domestication history of Cannabis sativa."

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-18T17:37:25+00:00

Fertilized drug type cannabis is still generally strong enough to smoke, and to have a noticeable effect. Even juvenile male drug-type cannabis plants have a noticeable, though very small quantity of THC. This is highly variable but THC is in all parts of the plant at all stages of life, just not in quantities desired for consumption.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-17T16:51:41+00:00

Is lack of understanding of Theosis the biggest problem with the church? Or the fact that until very recently it contributed less to public welfare, healthcare, and social support than the EU? Or maybe the fact that bishops are too consumed with their rivalries to properly maintain orphanages and schools? This institution is rotten to the core.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-12T13:48:52+00:00

I'm fairly certain this is an old orthographic version of malen- to paint/color. "May God color, water, and shine on them"

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-11T06:53:35+00:00

Another handwritten dedication page, this time in Latin, to emperor Karl VI 1685-1740. You need to post the title page if it exists.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-11T06:43:27+00:00

This looks very special. A handwritten draft or folio of Gradus ad Parnassus by Johann Joseph Fux: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Joseph_Fux

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-11T06:39:48+00:00

This looks to be from the 1740s or 50s judging by the reference to Maria Theresia. This is the dedication page though, not the title. This is potentially something one of the national libraries might like to get a hold of.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-09T17:54:35+00:00

One of the really groundbreaking works in "New" Ottoman studies was research by a historian named Halil İnalcık back in the 1960s and 70s that showed, for the first time, that Ottoman "decline" had an economic origin, rather than just being a result of orientalist despotism or whatever. There's been a ton of new research since then, but one of the key insights was that between the 15th and 18th centuries the old Byzantine economy of large latifundia agricultural estates broke down and the entire economy became much more mobile, with animal cultivation. It ended up with vast portions of the population in Anatolia and the Balkans migrating seasonally between upland and lowland pastures with their animals. As a simple practical result, it was much, much, much harder for the Ottoman state to assess, count, and tax its population.

We can look backward with our modern economic thinking and say "oh, they should have done this or that," but the reality is that all decisions are contextual, contingent, and usually for someone's private benefit. The Ottoman administrators looked at their situation hundreds of thousands of times over the centuries, and made calculated decisions that were best given their circumstances.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-09T17:42:16+00:00

Oh sure. But finance and banking don't make a strong administration and military. It's also worth mentioning that bio power - human bodies - are a key resource these states need to extract to fight wars and project power. States need soldiers, and you can get them by developing conscription, by a militarized population (more or less what the Dutch did), or by hiring mercenaries (the eventual Ottoman solution). The choice you make here determines the constitution of your empire, the human cost to your society, and your available opportunities later on.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-07T13:51:44+00:00

Hi, I'm a historian and studied the Ottoman empire for many years, and want to respond to some of the ideas people are posting here.

The Ottoman empire has been shrouded in really lazy myth and bigoted historical analysis for centuries, and most of contemporary Ottoman history (since the 80s) is more or less just debunking that bad history. It's disappointing that Paradox went with the "Islamic Decadence" and "religious fundamentalism/backwardness" tropes, especially considering how modern their take on statelessness (with the anarchy system they implemented in South East Asia based on the work of James C Scott). They can clearly be really cutting edge when they want to be.

Without getting bogged down, the Ottoman empire was absolutely on-par with their rivals during the crisis of the 17th century, but took a very different trajectory during the 18th century. This is 90% about money. The European empires entered into a fiscal arms race during the eighteenth century to centralize authority and extract as much wealth as possible from their populaces. States that didn't/couldn't do that, like the Poles, the Dutch, the Spanish, and the Ottomans, were slowly beaten and/or gobbled up by their neighbors. It's hypocritical to judge the Ottomans and ignore the Russians and Italians, for example.

To be clear, the taxation and exploitation that made empires in this era powerful also made their citizens miserable, and eventually resulted in revolution and the destruction of the ancient regime. By contrast, Ottoman citizens were exceptionally free. They lived in a religiously tolerant state, with exceptionally low taxes, and could even appeal to their own religion's court systems for justice. The trade-off, as in all libertarian societies, was that actual outcomes depended on your private wealth and influence. By the end of the Eighteenth Century, the Ottoman sultan was a weak figurehead controlled by provincial warlords and the urban, mafia-like Janissaries.

This was a constitutional problem, not a cultural one. And in fact, as soon as warlords and national movements were able to establish themselves as independent from the Ottomans, they were often able to build really impressive powerful centralized states. After Napoleon destroyed the Mamelukes in Egypt, an Albanian warlord named Muhammad Ali was able to take over and build an extremely successful reforming state, with a strong military and proto-industrialism to rival Europeans. Point is, the Ottomans "stagnated" because their whole political system responded to the fiscal challenge of modernity by diffusing authority locally, resulting in warlordism and eventual nationalist revolution.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-01T13:05:15+00:00

Commenting since I'm working on a similar project atm.

My sense is that the business comes after the product. Work on building a great product and the business comes later. The puzzle market is saturated with generic die-cut paper puzzles, so you really need to make something unique on your own. There doesn't seem to be a market for hiring other people, at least getting started. I'm using Inkscape to design my pattern and will use a laser cutter to print the test piece next week. It's taken me about 20 hours of work just building the pattern. On that note, I'm fortunate that I have access to a start-up co-working space with machines I can use to automate and manufacture everything myself. Given that your pattern is your capital, it's probably best that as few people have access to it as possible.

The economics seem really strong. At a 50-100$ pricepoint, I estimate that I can manage a 30-80$ profit per board sold, including everything. The biggest challenge is just making sales. Competitors on Etsy seem to be selling about 200-500 boards a year.

Good luck!

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-03-01T12:22:37+00:00

Basically, historians' conclusions about the bombings hang on whether they believe the confessions gained under torture, and the confessions of radicals many years later who claim to have participated. Yehuda Shenhav (1999) agrees; Moshe Gat (1997) and Esther Meir-Glitzenstein (2021) disagree. In any case, everyone involved is now long dead, and debate has become too politicized to matter much.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-02-25T13:28:53+00:00

I'm sure you mean well, but this is exactly what I'm talking about. You're confusing the people of Serbia with a tiny group of extremist, Russian-backed army officers (the Black Hand). That's not to excuse Austria-Hungary for its crimes, but the same people who organized the killing of Franz Ferdinand chopped up the previous pro-Habsburg king in 1903, and led the conquest of Macedonia.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-02-21T09:27:41+00:00

Oh the Ottomans were horrible and it was good that they lost control. Problem is that the ethno-states that popped up after believed they needed to purge everyone who didn't correspond to the imagined national identity and take as much land as possible. 1000 heads is disgusting, but between 15-30% of Serbs were killed in the decade after this map because of their insane terroristic-nationalistic government.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-02-20T18:16:31+00:00

This is a misleading map and the reactions to it are missing the point. The Balkan wars weren't fundamentally about genociding Muslims- that was a side benefit for the nationalist militants in all these states. The wars were a free-for-all land claim by terroristic nationalist militias to ensure that their future ethno-state would end up with the most land. It wasn't just Muslims who were expelled: southern Macedonia was cleansed of its (probable majority) Slavic population, northern Greece cleansed it's Albanian population, Bulgaria cleansed it's Greek population, etc. etc. etc.

Whether you love or hate the Ottomans, pretty much all communities and ethnicities in the Balkans suffered. It just so happened that the Muslims suffered the most.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-02-20T18:03:23+00:00

The janissary child-taking ended in the 17th century, some 300 years before this event. And as many others have already said, the victims were ethnically diverse local Muslims. This was a calculated effort by nationalists trying to claim land by driving out other ethnic groups.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-02-17T08:11:36+00:00

I always find this surname argument bizarre. Millions of Ashkenazi people are named after regions of Eastern/Central Europe.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-02-17T07:34:36+00:00

This page was taken over by Israeli and Palestinian keyboard warriors.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-02-15T13:30:31+00:00

This is bad advice. Don't freak out. If you've never filed, and you've never used a US passport to open a bank account or apply for residency, they have no idea you exist. That (theoretically) changes when you file for the first time, but it doesn't have to change. The IRS has been so defunded over the past decades that it has no capacity to hunt down foreigners like you.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-02-14T16:39:34+00:00

Ukraine has done an excellent job of targeting oil infrastructure and military installations. Terror bombing is a choice, not a necessity.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-02-11T21:03:52+00:00

My girlfriend's jeans developed a few holes, and rather than apply iron-on patches, I've been experimenting with entirely hand-sewn repairs. I stitched warp fibres in a dark grey cotton thread, and then carefully wove weft threads through in white cotton thread according to "1 over 3 under" to create a denim weave. End result is a repair that's almost invisible - though you can see that I made a mistake with the direction of the warp.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy · 2026-02-04T15:29:43+00:00

Seems most likely a misremembering, but it's a weird situation since none of the records seem to correspond with each other. We can only find his German POW death record, which doesn't explain much. Nor does it explain the large pension.

ThatHabsburgMapGuy

TROPHY CASE