Cocaine found in 400-year-old mummified brain tissue stuns experts

Experts have found evidence of cocaine in the mummified brains from the 17th century, changing what we thought we knew about the history of narcotics.

Despite being an illegal drug, cocaine use today is fairly widespread across Europe, with people finding increasingly inventive ways to traffic drugs across oceans.

Experts previously thought cocaine had been used in premodern Europe since around the 1800s. However, the discovery of mummified brain tissue of two individuals who died in the 1600s and had cocaine in them has since shattered their theory.

The mummified individuals were buried in a 17th-century crypt in the former Ca’ Granda hospital in Milan, Italy. Gaia Giordano from the University of Milan, along with a team of colleagues, looked at several of the mummified bodies that died at some point in the 1600s.

When they tested samples of the brain tissue, traces of cocaine were found in two of the brains, to their huge surprise.

Dr. Giordano said: “It’s very extraordinary to find that molecule.”

It was previously thought that the use of cocaine did not begin in Europe until the 19th century when a German chemist was able to isolate cocaine from the coca plant, which itself dates back around 7,000 years.

However, the new discovery suggests that this theory is out by around 200 years.

Dr Benjamin Breen, a historian at the University of California, Santa Cruz, put forward the idea that coca leaves from South America may have been marketed as a new medicinal product to Europeans.

“It’s plausible to me that some coca leaves would have made their way across the Atlantic to Europe as a curiosity,” he told the New York Times.

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