Ancient Iberians Ingested Red Dust Loaded With Mind-Altering Mercury

MARCH 5, 2024

Bones in Spain suggest a mercury-rich mineral used for art and hallucinogenic trips poisoned a community 5,000 years ago


Five thousand years ago, in what’s now southern Spain, a special set of women donned their ceremonial gowns, bedecked with tens of thousands of beads crafted from shell, ivory and amber. Perhaps before a crowd, pulsing to chants and drumbeats, these oracle-like figures hunched over a heap of radiant red powder. Then they inhaled the particles, or maybe downed them mixed in an elixir.

Ground from a mineral called cinnabar, the substance would have sent them into a fevered trance with tremors and delirium. On this mind-altering trip, the women may have liaised with deities and divined their society’s future—unaware that the powder’s potency came from its main elemental component: the toxic metal mercury.

As they repeated these rites throughout their lives, the poison built up in their bodily tissues. Millennia later, archaeologists measured mercury in the bones of these women and others from their community, revealing values orders of magnitude higher than what health experts consider tolerable today. It seems at this Copper Age site called Valencina, between about 2900 and 2650 B.C.E., ritual leaders intentionally ingested mercury-rich cinnabar for ceremonies or magic. More community members consumed it accidentally, while working with the pigment or through environmental contamination, according to a study published this past November in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory.

“These are enormous levels,” says Jerrold Leikin, a physician and toxic metals expert at the University of Illinois Chicago. He usually sees exposures presented as nanograms of mercury per gram of tissue, but the Valencina results report micrograms per gram—1,000 times as large. “One would expect significant symptoms,” says Leikin, who was not involved with the research but has collaborated with archaeologists to consider mercury in ancient humans from other regions.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ancient-iberians-ingested-red-dust-loaded-with-mind-altering-mercury-180983889/