A 1,000-year-old pouch made of three fox snouts held traces of ayahuasca's key ingredients

About 1,000 years ago, someone in the Bolivian Andes carried a small pouch sewn from the snouts of three foxes. When scientists scraped its inside, they found chemical traces of at least five mind-altering compounds, including harmine and DMT, the two key ingredients of ayahuasca. The study, published in PNAS in 2019, suggests that the roots of that brew may go back at least a thousand years.

The pouch came from Cueva del Chileno, a rock shelter at 3,890 meters above sea level in the Sora River valley, in the Lípez highlands of southwestern Bolivia. Archaeologists Juan Albarracín-Jordán and José Capriles excavated the site in 2008 and 2010. The cave looked like a burial site, but no human remains turned up, only a leather bundle protected by the dry mountain air.

The kit was remarkably complete. The leather bag, about 28 by 16.5 centimeters, held two carved wooden snuff tablets, a snuffing tube decorated with two braids of real human hair, two spatulas made of llama bone, a colorful woven headband, bits of dried plant stems tied with wool and the fox-snout pouch, made from the Andean fox, Lycalopex culpaeus. Radiocarbon dating of the bag placed it between 905 and 1170 CE.

That date falls at the end of Tiwanaku, a state that had spread its influence across the south-central Andes for about five centuries. Snuff trays and tubes were part of a long ritual tradition in the region, used to grind plants into powder and inhale it.

Melanie Miller, then at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at the University of Otago, analyzed the samples with liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, a technique sensitive enough to detect tiny amounts of a compound. The scraping revealed cocaine and its breakdown product benzoylecgonine, bufotenine, DMT, harmine and a peak that may correspond to psilocin, the active compound in some mushrooms.

Those molecules point to at least three plants: the coca shrub, a tree of the genus Anadenanthera, whose seeds are ground into a powerful snuff, and the vine Banisteriopsis caapi, the base of ayahuasca. The DMT could have come from Anadenanthera or from leaves of Psychotria viridis, known as chacruna.

The combination matters. On its own, swallowed DMT is quickly broken down by an enzyme in the gut. Harmine and related compounds in the vine block that enzyme, monoamine oxidase, which lets the DMT reach the brain. That is the chemical trick behind ayahuasca, and finding both substances in one ritual object suggests someone may have been combining them a thousand years ago. Capriles told Penn State it was the largest number of psychoactive substances ever found in a single archaeological assemblage in South America.

There are limits to what the pouch can prove. Nobody can say whether its owner drank a brew or inhaled a mixed snuff, and no bodies were found to test. But none of these plants grow at that altitude, and several come from distant tropical regions of South America. According to Berkeley News, that suggests a traveling ritual specialist or a long-distance trade network for sacred plants.

Miller also told Berkeley News that many of these plants can be poisonous at the wrong dose, so whoever owned the bundle needed great knowledge of how to use them and where to find them. That expertise existed centuries before the Inca Empire rose in the 1400s.

Sources: Miller et al., PNAS (2019); Penn State News (2019); Berkeley News (2019); University of Otago (2019). Cover: Flowers of the ayahuasca vine Banisteriopsis caapi.