Paleomedicine and the Evolutionary Context of Medicinal Plant Use
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REVIEW
Paleomedicine and the Evolutionary Context of Medicinal Plant Use Karen Hardy 1,2 Received: 8 September 2020 / Accepted: 23 September 2020 # Sociedade Brasileira de Farmacognosia 2020
Abstract Modern human need for medicines is so extensive that it is thought to be a deep evolutionary behavior. There is abundant evidence from our Paleolithic and later prehistoric past, of survival after periodontal disease, traumas, and invasive medical treatments including trepanations and amputations, suggesting a detailed, applied knowledge of medicinal plant secondary compounds. Direct archeological evidence for use of plants in the Paleolithic is rare, but evidence is growing. An evolutionary context for early human use of medicinal plants is provided by the broad evidence for animal self-medication, in particular, of non-human primates. During the later Paleolithic, there is evidence for the use of poisonous and psychotropic plants, suggesting that Paleolithic humans built on and expanded their knowledge and use of plant secondary compounds. Keywords Human self-medication . Medicinal plants . Paleolithic . Psychoactive plants . Raw materials
Introduction Humans love medicines (Sullivan et al. 2010). Expenditure on pharmacological drugs was US$455.9 billion in the USA in 2017 (Schumock et al. 2017) while global spending on pharmaceuticals was a startling US$1.25 trillion in 2019 (Mikulic 2020). Many modern human groups in traditional societies continue to rely heavily on their pharmaceutical knowledge of wild plants and demonstrate astounding levels of knowledge, for example in New Guinea, use of 1035 plant species was recorded in the 1970s, of which 332 species from 99 different families were used specifically for their medicinal compounds (Powell 1976). Still, in 2002, over 80% of people in developing countries continued to rely on plants for their medicinal requirements (Ssegawa and Kasenene 2007). The extent of the human desire for medicines suggests this may be an evolutionary behavior (Johns 1990; Sullivan et al. 2010), while a study of some modern medicinal plants that linked the useful medicinal compounds of certain plants to the way they were used in three separate regions of the world * Karen Hardy [email protected] 1
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Pg. Lluís Companys 23, 08010 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
2
Departament de Prehistòria, Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, 08193 Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
provides an indication of the antiquity and efficacy of their use (Saslis-Lagoudakis et al. 2012). However, searching for evidence of use of medicines in the archeological record is challenging; plant remains only rarely survive into the deep Paleolithic past, and when they do survive, it can be hard to demonstrate deliberate medicinal application. The only other way to obtain direct empirical evidence for the use of medicinal plants is through recovery and analysis of biomolecular compounds that can be present in residual material such as hum
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