Who invented smoking?

Question

Did Geronimo wake up from a dream one morning with a vision?

OK, Hiawatha, you start a fire. Keemosabe, you grind up some tobacco leaves. Tonto, you fetch some birch bark. Sitting Bull, roll up some tobacco powder into that birch bark. Now, Dances with Wolves, shove that smart stick into your mouth. Hiawatha, light it in on fire. Everybody stand back. OK Dances with Wolves, inhale slowly and tell us what happens!

How did somebody figure all that out for the first time?

It's easier for me to understand the Egyptian pyramids than to to understand the invention of smoking.

Answer 1

tell me you're a writer.

that made me laugh.

Answer 2

A little clue here...it wasn't tobacco they was a-smokin'.

Answer 3

That's pretty funny, but I know what you mean.

Infumation, the inhalation of smoke into lungs, has been a really common theme across all of human history. I'm sure it was by accident that they found "Hey! Smoking these things gives me a better feeling than this other thing!"

It's all accident, really. Just like alcohol. Alcohol was one of humanity's very first inventions.

Answer 4

If you've ever been involved in trying to stop a bushfire then you'll know the strange "high" you feel after it. That was probably how they first worked it out.

But the stuff they gave the white man was tobacco (the crappy stuff) and not what they themselves used. How different history would have been.

Answer 5

Well, you don't understand it because we are now living in artificial environments.  People lived for millions of years living beside a fire, loving the fire, appreciating the fire and involving it as much as possible. They used smoke as communication, heat from fires was survival in the cold, food tasted better because of fire. Fire cleared the land for fields. Fire was life itself.  Can you imagine no TV, no computer, (ok, I feel like John Lennon now) nothing to do but look at the fire for hours. You play with it.