Carl Sagan once speculated that cannabis may have been the very plant that inspired the age of agriculture. The first crop so useful that some long forgotten nomadic foraging society decided to stop roaming around in favor of becoming farmers.
Obviously that’s just conjecture—and Sagan was a notorious cannabis enthusiast, so perhaps it should be taken with an extra grain of salt. But even if cannabis wasn’t the first agricultural product on planet Earth, we do know that human use dates back around 10,000 years.
For perspective, at that time there were still a few woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers running around, though they were in the process of going extinct. Cannabis, meanwhile, was about to begin a long, strange relationship with humanity in which the plant would be both joyously extolled and ruthlessly exterminated.