Has anyone solved the mystery of how did traces of nicotine get found in the Egyptian mummies...?

Question

It's a fact that nicotine can only be found in tobacco plants. And, at the time of the pharaohs, tobacco plants were only to be found in North America. How did they get across the ocean to get it?

Answer 1

man, they smoked it. we werent there so nobody really knows even with all the studying I think.

Answer 2

This is just a guess but maybe it was a different kind of tobacco other than NA tobacco.  There is no way no one smoked tobacco before america was found.  Either that or it was a precious thing traded and used for embalming...

Answer 3

Tobacco has the most nicotine, but there a lot of other plants that contain it and some grow in Africa.

Answer 4

when researchers started working with them,they probably left it behind

Answer 5

If traces were found in the lung tissue, then obviously it had been ingested or smoked or taking in to the body in some manner. If it was just traces on the surface, then it may have been from persons smoking around the mummy.

I seem to recall it was in lung tissue. North America had tobacco use by American Indians but it was a different grade of tobacco than what was introduced by Europeans and grown into what we have now.

I don't think far travel can't be ruled out since there are too many unexplained relics from other far away countries that have been found in North America that pre-date 1400.

Answer 6

Current evidence actually suggests ancient trade between the Americas and Egypt.  Same goes for Ancient China and the Americas.   Why no descendants from ancient voyages?  Who says there are not.  Would you recognize Egyptian or Chinese traits over 50 or 100 generations?

Answer 7

Maybe someone who smoked excavated the particular mummy?

Answer 8

Because the mummies weren't excavated yesterday.

Up until the late 1970s EVERYBODY smoked. You don't see it on TV, but in the old days, when citizens still had rights, you could smoke anywhere you wanted. In restaurants, at work, in bars, anywhere and everywhere.  This includes museums, where mummies might be on display, or in archaeological digs, where mummies would be found, or in train stations and on ships, where mummies would be transported. They would have been found by smokers, carried by smokers, transported by smokers, viewed by smokers.

So any mummy that was found before about 1990 would have spent many years being exposed to "second hand smoke".