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Date: | Tue, 20 Jul 1999 22:57:13 +1000 |
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OK, here's some weird stuff for the list. On coming to work today (well
OK, your tomorrow unless you're on the right side of the dateline such as
my fellow "down under" co-conspirators) I was confronted by a number of
folks in my office that wanted to know all about the Discovery Channel show
that they had seen the night before that claimed that mummys around the
world (i.e. Egypt, Africa, Asia, etc going back millenia before the
Columbian Exchange) had been found to have detectable traces of tobacco and
cocaine in preserved hair based on the work of a current forensic annalyst.
I have put forward my ideas on these compounds being the products of New
World plants and faced the scorn for a non-media "expert" in competition
with that fine source of all knowledge - the TV - that it was highly
unlikely that tobacco or cocaine was being transported between the Old and
the New World previous to at least the 16th century (and here I *thought*
that I was being pretty conservative). So, being the poor trusting b#$#%^d
that I am, I am hoping for back up, or at least not too much scorn from
other people on the list to try to back this up. If not, I guess that we
can postulate a "Columbian exchange" of a fairly modern meaning well before
the 20th c. :)
Lon
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