> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# What the teeth said: 25,000 years ago in Sulawesi, someone found comfort in a nut
- URL: https://www.earthtoseanews.com/betel-teeth/
- Published: 2026-10-03T05:03:34.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-03T05:09:36.000Z
- Description: Two sets of ancient teeth from Sulawesi carry the same deep grooves and the same chemical trace, and Australian and Indonesian scientists say they tell of people chewing betel nut for comfort 25,000 years ago.
- Author: Nicole McMahon
- Tags: Global Good News, All stories

Betel nut is the seed of the areca palm, and across Asia and the Pacific hundreds of millions of people still wrap it in a leaf with a little lime and chew it for the mild lift it gives, a habit as ordinary as a morning coffee. How far back it goes has been a guess. Now a team led by Adam Brumm of Griffith University's Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, working with Indonesian archaeologists, has an answer from two people who lived in the limestone country of South Sulawesi. One lived between 25,000 and 16,000 years ago, the other between 7,600 and 6,300 years ago, ten thousand years apart, and both had the same unusual thing in their mouths: deep grooves worn into the teeth by years of sucking on a small round object a centimetre or two across. Inside the teeth the team then found arecoline, the compound that gives betel nut its effect. Published in Science Advances on 9 September, it is the earliest evidence anywhere in the world of people habitually using a plant for how it makes them feel.

Brumm suspects it began as a remedy. Some of the grooves reached the nerve of the tooth, which would have hurt, and betel nut numbs. "I suspect that was the effect that they were after," he told Ellen Phiddian of ABC Science. What the two sets of teeth really record is something gentler than the headline word "drug": people in a hunter gatherer world who knew their plants well, found one that eased pain and lifted the mood, and passed the knowledge down through four hundred generations to the betel sellers on street corners today. Sofia Samper Carro of the Australian National University, who was not part of the study, said the pairing of the tooth wear with the chemistry is what makes it convincing. Sulawesi keeps giving the world these glimpses; its caves hold some of the oldest painted animals ever found. Now its teeth hold the oldest known comfort.

### Sources and links

Our short take: the full story is by Ellen Phiddian for ABC Science (10 September 2026), on the Science Advances paper by Adam Brumm and colleagues; further detail from Griffith University's release via ScienceDaily (9 September 2026).

- [Traces of betel nut in 25,000 year old teeth, by Ellen Phiddian, ABC Science](https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2026-09-10/earliest-evidence-of-human-drug-use-discovered-in-indonesia/107130656) The report and the quotes.
- [Ancient teeth reveal humans were getting high 25,000 years ago, ScienceDaily](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/09/260909231705.htm) Griffith University's release.
- [Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University](https://www.griffith.edu.au/research/australian-research-centre-human-evolution) Brumm's centre.