The Dawn of Medicine, Plus or Minus a Couple Million Years

I was puzzled by an article in today's New York Times called "Researchers rewrite first chapter for the history of medicine." William Honan, the reporter, announced that "an art historian and a medical researcher say they have pushed back by hundreds of years the earliest use of a medicinal plant." Until now, he wrote, the oldest evidence dated back to 1000 BC, but now researchers had discovered a picture 3500 years old showing a Greek goddess overseeing crocus flowers being made into medicines. This painting will certainly tell historians a lot about medicine in ancient Greece, but the article pretends that it has something to say about the origin of medicine itself. That's absurd. People all over the world have well-established traditions of using medicinal plants. Did Australian aborigines and Incas in Peru copy the ideas of the Greeks? How would they even hear about them? It's far more likely ...