RESEARCHERS say they have discovered traces of cocaine in 4000-year-old Egyptian mummies, which they call evidence of contact with American cultures centuries before Christopher Columbus. The decade-long study languished “under pressure from people with obscure interests who don’t accept changes in the interpretation of history,” researcher Svetlana Balabanova said from Frankfurt, Germany. Cocaine is synthesized from the leaves of the coca plant cultivated in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. – AFP