Forensics backdates cocaine use in Europe to the 1600s!

 

This group was like "no one is going to believe this, so we're going to put every chromatogram and fragment ion in the main body of the text as individual figures".  They broke into a mausoleum, took some pieces of previously undisturbed people and looked for cocaine and cocaine metabolites (they've previously found opioids using similar approaches). 

It doesn't sound impossible, because there was clearly "trade" between Europe and the Americas well before that but this moves the needle back more than a century (according to the introduction, I know nothing about this).

They used a TSQ Fortis II and 10 minute gradients, following solid phase extraction. 

I do know there are some confusing entries in the method section for the mass spectrometer, though.... 

I've never had a Fortis, but I'm sure that these are not accurate descriptions of the hardware. I wondered if they meant 70,000 amu/s or something? but I suspect part of this table was carried over from a completely different piece of hardware. A little scary to see an oversight or error this easy to catch when basing a controversial finding solely on the operation and results of the instrument in question, but otherwise an interesting read.