Cannabis most likely came from Asia, and people were growing it thousands of years before anyone gave a strain a name. A major 2021 genetic study places its domestication in East Asia roughly 12,000 years ago, though other researchers dispute where. Some of the earliest direct evidence of people burning it for its effects is about 2,500 years old. And the first named varieties most people would recognize, such as Acapulco Gold and Panama Red, only appear in the 1960s.
Here is what the evidence actually shows, and where the popular versions of this story go wrong.
Where did weed originally come from?
One of the largest genetic studies of the plant's history, published in Science Advances in 2021, sequenced 110 cannabis genomes from around the world. Its authors concluded that cannabis was first domesticated in early Neolithic times in East Asia, and that all current hemp and drug varieties descend from an ancestral gene pool still represented by wild-growing plants and landraces in China. They date the split between that ancestral group and cultivated cannabis to roughly 12,000 years ago.
That conclusion is not settled. The cannabis botanist John McPartland has pointed out that most of the samples in the study's key ancestral group came from Xinjiang and Qinghai, which most definitions place in Central Asia rather than East Asia, and he argues the dating method should have produced a range rather than a single figure. So the fairest short answer is Asia, most likely its eastern or central regions, with the exact place still argued over.
For much of that history, cannabis appears to have been grown mainly for fiber and seed. Direct evidence of people using it for its effects shows up much later.
When did people start smoking cannabis?
Some of the earliest well-dated physical evidence of cannabis being burned for its psychoactive compounds comes from the Jirzankal Cemetery, high in the eastern Pamir mountains of what is now western China. Researchers analyzing wooden braziers from tombs dated to around 500 BCE found chemical residue showing that cannabis plants had been burned in them during funeral ceremonies, and that those plants produced high levels of psychoactive compounds.
That fits a written account from the same era. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE, described how the Scythians, nomads of the Eurasian steppe, cleansed themselves after a burial. They covered a frame of poles with wool mats over a pit of red-hot stones, threw hemp seed onto the stones, and, in his words, "howl in their joy at the vapor-bath." The Jirzankal braziers come from a different people and region, but they show that burning cannabis in funeral rites was practiced in the same era.
Did ancient Hindu texts mention ganja?
Not by that name. A claim that circulates widely says that "Hindu texts from 1500 BCE mention ganja as one of five sacred plants." Two parts of it are wrong, and a third is disputed.
The text usually meant is the Atharvaveda, a Vedic collection generally dated to somewhere between about 1500 and 1000 BCE. The relevant verse refers to "five kingdoms of plants," not five sacred plants, and the plant it names is bhanga, not ganja. Whether bhanga in that verse even means cannabis is debated among scholars of Sanskrit. As for the word "ganja," the scholar G. A. Grierson, writing for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission in the 1890s, found its earliest use in a text from around 1300 CE, more than two thousand years after the Veda. We cover how ganja and other slang entered English in why is it called weed.
What was the first strain of weed?
There was no single first strain. For almost all of its history, cannabis was not grown as named strains at all. It grew as landraces: traditional local varieties that developed in one region over many generations, adapted to that place's climate and selected by the people who grew them.
Landraces were known by where they came from, which is why so many classic names are place names. The Hindu Kush mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Durban in South Africa, Thailand, Mexico and Colombia all gave their names to cannabis varieties. We trace how those landraces became today's hybrids in the evolution of cannabis seeds.
The first named varieties that most people would recognize come from the 1960s, and they follow the same rule. Merriam-Webster gives the first known use of "Panama Red" as 1966, for reddish cannabis from Panama. Dictionary.com records "Acapulco gold," a prized Mexican variety, from 1965 to 1970. Both were named for where they came from, and in Panama Red's case for its color. If you want a practical answer to "what was the first strain," those two are among the earliest named varieties that dictionaries date.
How do weed strains get their names?
The naming follows a rough history of its own. The oldest names describe places, because landraces were identified by origin. The 1960s names add a description to the place, like Acapulco Gold and Panama Red. Later, as breeders began crossing landraces, names increasingly came from the breeder, from the parent strains, or simply from marketing.
That last shift matters when you are shopping. A strain name tells you what a grower chose to call a plant. It does not guarantee that two products with the same name share the same genetics, which is why lab results are a better guide to what is in a jar than the name on it.
Where did OG Kush come from?
OG Kush is the best-known example of a strain whose origin is genuinely disputed. The versions that circulate are largely oral history from growers rather than documented fact, and they disagree with each other on where the original plant came from and what "OG" stands for. We lay out the competing accounts in OG Kush lineage.
Sources and further reading
- Large-scale whole-genome resequencing unravels the domestication history of Cannabis sativa — Ren and colleagues, Science Advances, 2021
- John McPartland's critique of the 2021 domestication study — on its choice of location and its single-date estimate
- Jirzankal Cemetery cannabis residue study (PMC) — Science Advances, 2019, some of the earliest well-dated evidence of cannabis burned for its psychoactive compounds
- Herodotus, Histories 4.73 to 4.75 — the Scythian hemp vapor-bath, in A. D. Godley's translation
- Atharvaveda, Book 11, Hymn 6 — Ralph T. H. Griffith's translation, including the "five kingdoms of the plants" verse
- G. A. Grierson's note for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission (National Library of Scotland) — his note for the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission, dating the earliest use of "ganja" to about 1300 CE
- Cannabis in India — Wikipedia, on the scholarly debate over identifying bhanga with cannabis
- Panama Red — Merriam-Webster, first known use 1966
- Acapulco gold — Dictionary.com, first recorded 1965 to 1970
This article is for general information for adults 21 and older. Information is current as of September 30, 2026.
