Here's Some Medicine

This is Dink-Dink:

She’s a goober, and an important part of our family. She also knows a few things about medicine.

Well, maybe that claim is a bit bold, but let me work my way around to it. Sometimes, she’ll have an upset tummy from something she ate earlier, and she’ll need to puke. This is very rare since I make her meals by hand every day, but sometimes she’s given other little treats that might not sit well.

In those rare situations, Dinkles knows just how to remedy the situation: by eating grass. This is really self-medication at its core and at its origin.

If the claim still sounds a step too bold, let’s think about how chimpanzees are able to observe behaviors in other animals in the wild, and then copy them. If our apelike ancestors could do this—and there’s no reason to believe they couldn’t—then we probably got some of our first ideas about how to heal or soothe ourselves by copying animals already doing it.

A hundred thousand years ago, give or take an awful lot of years, our ancestors developed enough of a language so that they could convey information with sounds from their mouths. Suddenly (over tens of thousands of years), lessons could be learned by one person and then passed on to another.

Language opened up the floodgates. Now, instead of seeing an act in order to understand it, people could be told about things in advance. They might now be on the lookout for a particular herb that worked better than other herbs. They could compare notes.

Knowing what to eat was very, very important stuff! It was also complicated—since we could name things, we had a lot more things to keep track of. There was no getting off the hook by forgetting a particular plant once a group of shamans knew the name and a description.

Shamans developed rituals that helped them remember how to help people recover from injuries and illnesses, and the seeds of what eventually came to be called medicine were planted.

Here is where myths, songs, and stories enter the picture. That’s how a lot of facts about the world were remembered, even as new fantasies about ourselves and our world were spun out of whole cloth. Some of these stories and plenty of this wisdom ended up being written down once we had developed the ability to record our thoughts permanently.

Now, we could pass information along to another generation without them even having met us. Now, information could be passed along much, much more carefully and accurately. Even still, it would take a few thousand years of humans from different areas of the world comparing notes before modern medicine would be born.