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We have archeological evidence for the last 5K years. While humans or our ancestors may have used herbs for literally millions of years as the article implies,

by _0w8t 5y ago

We have archeological evidence for the last 5K years. While humans or our ancestors may have used herbs for literally millions of years as the article implies, we do not have any evidence for it.

teknopaul 5y ago
There is a fine line between medicine and eating what you need to survive. Reality is that all animals, even single cell animals, know what to eat. Treating scurvy, is as simple as eating fruit and there is naturally evidence that we have been doing that since as long as we were unable to synthesise it.
- teknopaul 5y ago
  What's more interesting is that humans have forgotten how. Not that animals haven't.
- teknopaul 5y ago
  Given the covid context its interesting that we have lost the ability to self medicate based on learning. I find it difficult to grok that in parts of Africa and the United States of America a huge number of humans have lost the ability to eat healthily.
- _0w8t 5y ago
  There is a difference between eating random plants and relying on evolution to spread the trait of eating something beneficial and recognizing that a particular herb was useful for a particular symptom, then recognizing that symptom in others and passing the herb to them.
roughly 5y ago
But that's why this is so silly - because the baseline assumption is that we did Not do that, and so we "only have evidence" for the last 5000 years. It would be stranger if early humans Didn't do this. It's like saying we've only got evidence for humans eating food for the last 10,000 years. Archaeology's more than happy to make assumptions - the running jokes in the field about "for ritual use" and "Sappho and her pal" are testament to that, but the baseline view of the world embedded in those assumptions is absolutely absurd and archaic.
- _0w8t 5y ago
  It is not silly. It could be that wide spread and persistent use of herbs required a certain level of population density and people traveling far to spread the word and learn from others. That is why observing apes doing that was important since it showed that practice could be sustainable among early ancestors of humans.
  - roughly 5y ago
    > It could be that wide spread and persistent use of herbs required a certain level of population density and people traveling far to spread the word and learn from others. It could be, but that's an assumption. Again, the null hypothesis being posited is "premodern humans didn't do this, unless proven otherwise," which is absolutely an assumption, and one already derived from a distinctly unique mode of human experience, i.e. Urban dweller in a high population. Even at the time that scholars were developing the mental models that have continued today to make the field willingly blind to actual human existence, most humans lived in one ecosystem over a long period of time and passed down oral folklore about medicinal herbs. By and large, for most of human history, most humans lived in the same bioregion as their ancestors and their ancestors' ancestors. The notion that they didn't know how the plants, animals, and other natural phenomenon operated in their environment - that they were so incurious and stupid as to not gain facility with their land, and so incurious, stupid, and antisocial as to not share this information by default - is absolutely an assumption made by the field, one that's belied by enormous amounts of oral mythological, horticultural, and medicinal tradition among every single culture we know of, including the culture of the people who founded the field, and frankly, one that's led to Anthropology's rather poor historical record vis-a-vis native cultures and racism. It's a practice of willful blindness akin to John Miur cropping natives out of his picture of Yosemite because he wanted to capture the "untrammeled wilderness" and couldn't see what he was really looking at.
    - _0w8t 5y ago
      We have a lot of archeological evidence that at least from the end of ice age people did travel long distances within short period of time, like several hundreds of miles or more. That implies exchange of information on much greater scale then it was possible with a small group leaving in a designated area. Yet we do not have evidence of such travel before the last ice age . Similarly humans started to live in a big villages only after the last ice age according to existing evidence. And again, bigger group implies faster spread of information. So assuming, as with other activities, that widespread use of herbs to treat specific illness did not happen before the last ice age was a reasonable null hypothesis.

by _0w8t 5y ago

We have archeological evidence for the last 5K years. While humans or our ancestors may have used herbs for literally millions of years as the article implies, we do not have any evidence for it.

teknopaul 5y ago

There is a fine line between medicine and eating what you need to survive. Reality is that all animals, even single cell animals, know what to eat. Treating scurvy, is as simple as eating fruit and there is naturally evidence that we have been doing that since as long as we were unable to synthesise it.

teknopaul 5y ago
What's more interesting is that humans have forgotten how. Not that animals haven't.
teknopaul 5y ago
Given the covid context its interesting that we have lost the ability to self medicate based on learning. I find it difficult to grok that in parts of Africa and the United States of America a huge number of humans have lost the ability to eat healthily.
_0w8t 5y ago
There is a difference between eating random plants and relying on evolution to spread the trait of eating something beneficial and recognizing that a particular herb was useful for a particular symptom, then recognizing that symptom in others and passing the herb to them.

roughly 5y ago

But that's why this is so silly - because the baseline assumption is that we did Not do that, and so we "only have evidence" for the last 5000 years. It would be stranger if early humans Didn't do this. It's like saying we've only got evidence for humans eating food for the last 10,000 years. Archaeology's more than happy to make assumptions - the running jokes in the field about "for ritual use" and "Sappho and her pal" are testament to that, but the baseline view of the world embedded in those assumptions is absolutely absurd and archaic.

_0w8t 5y ago
It is not silly. It could be that wide spread and persistent use of herbs required a certain level of population density and people traveling far to spread the word and learn from others. That is why observing apes doing that was important since it showed that practice could be sustainable among early ancestors of humans.
- roughly 5y ago
  > It could be that wide spread and persistent use of herbs required a certain level of population density and people traveling far to spread the word and learn from others. It could be, but that's an assumption. Again, the null hypothesis being posited is "premodern humans didn't do this, unless proven otherwise," which is absolutely an assumption, and one already derived from a distinctly unique mode of human experience, i.e. Urban dweller in a high population. Even at the time that scholars were developing the mental models that have continued today to make the field willingly blind to actual human existence, most humans lived in one ecosystem over a long period of time and passed down oral folklore about medicinal herbs. By and large, for most of human history, most humans lived in the same bioregion as their ancestors and their ancestors' ancestors. The notion that they didn't know how the plants, animals, and other natural phenomenon operated in their environment - that they were so incurious and stupid as to not gain facility with their land, and so incurious, stupid, and antisocial as to not share this information by default - is absolutely an assumption made by the field, one that's belied by enormous amounts of oral mythological, horticultural, and medicinal tradition among every single culture we know of, including the culture of the people who founded the field, and frankly, one that's led to Anthropology's rather poor historical record vis-a-vis native cultures and racism. It's a practice of willful blindness akin to John Miur cropping natives out of his picture of Yosemite because he wanted to capture the "untrammeled wilderness" and couldn't see what he was really looking at.
  - _0w8t 5y ago
    We have a lot of archeological evidence that at least from the end of ice age people did travel long distances within short period of time, like several hundreds of miles or more. That implies exchange of information on much greater scale then it was possible with a small group leaving in a designated area. Yet we do not have evidence of such travel before the last ice age . Similarly humans started to live in a big villages only after the last ice age according to existing evidence. And again, bigger group implies faster spread of information. So assuming, as with other activities, that widespread use of herbs to treat specific illness did not happen before the last ice age was a reasonable null hypothesis.