from a site called Shumla Cave No. 5 on the Rio Grande in Texas. The results dated the specimens to between 3780 and 3660 BCE. Alkaloid extraction yielded approximately 2% of the alkaloids including mescaline in both samples. This indicates that native North Americans were likely to have used peyote since at least five-anda-half thousand years ago.1 This study also speaks to the amazing durability of alkaloids like mescaline to persist in plant samples over time, or does it...there is controversy over how these buttons were preserved. Specimens of peyote threaded onto a cord from a burial cave in west central Coahuila, Mexico have been similarly analyzed and dated to 810 to 1070 CE.2
Many Native American tribes relate that they have been using Peyote since the beginning of time and its ancient history of usage has been recorded among various Southwestern Athabaskan-language tribal groups of northern Mexico, including the Huichol, Tarahumara, Tonkawa, Mescalero, and Lipan Apache. The Carrizo Apache were likely the first practitioners of peyote religion in the regions north of presentday Mexico.3 Of course, the distinction of tribes in Mexico and tribes north of that border is totally artificial and only about 200 years old, as we will see, the role that the Carrizo people play in this history is by the movement of a ritualized plant sacrament further from its natural range