A Brief History of Herbalism

A Brief History of Herbalism

Herbal medicine represents our earliest attempt at healing ourselves, and in fact some animals even seek out certain types of plants when they are injured or sick. Moose were observed by Native Americans foraging for Echinacea plants when they were sick, leading them to call the plants "elk root"; Other wildlife chew willow bark when in distress (we now know that willow bark contains salicylic acid, or aspirin as it is known, when synthesized) and monkeys and primates often forage for certain fruits and roots when sick.

Presumably our ancestors would have treated themselves in this way, no doubt long before they developed the ability to speak. Estimates of the exact time at which Homo sapiens appeared vary from about 100,000 years ago at the most conservative to 600,000 years ago at the most generous (paleoanthropology is a very competitive science, and every researcher wants their earliest dated humanoid bone fragments to be confirmed as human rather than "proto-human", but that's another article in itself!), but what is undoubted is, is that our ancestors were Africans.

Although H. sapiens originally emerged a long time ago, we began spreading out from Africa about 100,000 years ago, displacing other hominids (our cousins) such as H. erectus and (later) H. neanderthalensis and eventually driving them to extinction. By 60,000 years ago we had reached what is now Australia, and the northernmost tip of the Americas was colonized about 20,000 years ago. Amazingly, it only took about 1,000 years for humans to spread from what is now Alaska to the tip of South America, and when you consider the diversity of climatic and geographical conditions in the Americas, one can only marvel at the ingenuity and adaptability of our species.

Around 1,000 years ago, even the most remote inhabitable Pacific islands were colonized.

The reader would be forgiven at this point for wondering what this tour of human prehistory has to do with herbalism, but the point is simple. In every environment in which humans have made a home, they have quickly discovered all food plants and all medicinal plants. Every culture, in every climate (we must exclude cultures like the Inuit and Tatars of northern Siberia, for whom plants made up only a small part of their diet) has invented its own form of herbalism.

Herbalism takes two forms in most cultures – medicine and ritualism. Some plants are eaten when sick, others are used for shamanic rituals and other religious practices.

In the West, herbal remedies began to decline in popularity during the Enlightenment, and with the dawn of modern medicine in the late 17th century, it seemed as if the decline of herbalism was inevitable. Although we now have the most advanced synthetic drugs and medical practices we have ever had, many researchers are looking to herbs and their extracts as possible ways to treat some of our deadliest diseases. As I write this, laboratories around the world are testing plants and synthesizing analogues of their extracts for studies against cancer and incurable viral infections such as HIV.

We no longer need the ritualism and miracle healing of shamans, but our ancestors have advice for us that shines through the millennia - know your herbs and use the plants around you as they may one day save your life. And yet every year we continue to clear an area of ​​rainforest the size of Kentucky, destroying countless plant species still unknown to Western science.

In summary, despite all our advances and all our knowledge, we still have reason to rely on herbs and their extracts, and we destroy them at our own risk.