In these posts we will look again at the plants that the first humans used to look after themselves and their families: the very first medicines. We dip into the healing needs of the hunter-nomads, and then the earliest farmers and villagers.
Plants have common qualities that meant that people used them in similar ways wherever they were in the world.
These core approaches consistently feature in indigenous folk medicines and were later distilled into the classic medical texts from India, China and Europe thousands of years ago.
First medicines have always been there, for humans, and for animals too. They were there before cultural and spiritual healing traditions, shamanic medicine, dreamwork, energetic or religious-inspired interventions. And they are still there for us.
When humans learnt to use plant medicines life was an immersion in nature, and survival depended on working with it. Early health practitioners applied what they knew of nature’s ways to interpret the signs and symptoms of the body’s fight against disease and used the first medicines to nudge better self-healing. We will share some of these insights in future posts and on Facebook @herbslinger and Instagram theherbslinger. What we will discover is that they may be as relevant now as they were then.