History of Cigarette Smoking

Do you smoke? Do you know that smoking can cause cancer? Ever wonder where cigar smoking began? So have I so I decided to look into it, here's what I found. Cigars have been around for over 1,000 years! The original native population of the various islands in the Caribbean as well as the rest of Mesoamerica began making and smoking cigars as early as 900 AD. How do we know this? Archaeologists discovered a ceramic vessel at a Mayan dig site in Uaxactun, Guatemala which was painted with the likeness of a man smoking a cigar. The explorer, Christopher Columbus who found the Americas by accident when looking for a shorter trade route to India, is credited with introducing smoking to Europe and even with the actual discovery of smoking even though just like his "discovery" of the Americas, the true credit belongs to someone else which in this case would be the indigenous people of the Caribbean. Two of his crewmen from his 1492 voyage, Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis Torres reportedly went ashore in Cuba and smoked tobacco wrapped in husks made from maize and were therefore the first Europeans to smoke cigars.