Fashionable people, referred to as Homo sapiens sapiens, first appeared in Africa round 200,000 years in the past. By roughly 100,000 years in the past, they started migrating out of Africa, ultimately spreading throughout the globe. These early people have been extra anatomically and behaviorally superior than their predecessors, together with Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and earlier types of Homo sapiens . Their our bodies have been extra suited to strolling lengthy distances, permitting them to journey to numerous components of the world seeking meals. As they tailored to totally different environments, additionally they developed higher instruments and looking strategies .
As Patricia Netzley notes in her ebook World Historical past Sequence: The Stone Age, these early Homo sapiens sapiens lacked the pronounced facial options of the Neanderthals and had taller, much less strong our bodies. In look, they have been fairly just like trendy people. Netzley explains, “Longer legs gave them the flexibility to journey longer distances, which meant they got here into contact with many different tribes of individuals. This publicity to different cultures and concepts will be the supply of their better creativity in comparison with their ancestors” . Moreover, these people made all kinds of instruments, using supplies corresponding to rock, bone, antlers, ivory, and wooden . They common weapons like saws, chisels, flint axes, spears, bows, and arrows. Skinny items of bone have been used as needles to stitch hides into clothes . These developments enabled them to hunt bigger animals, just like the Woolly Mammoth, they usually used each a part of the animals they killed—consuming the meat, utilizing the bones for instruments, and creating ornaments and beads from leftover supplies .
They seemingly developed a type of communication, presumably each verbal and creative. Cave work present in a number of areas counsel that these early people used artwork to file their actions and relay information to future generations . Language, although speculative, should have existed to facilitate looking coordination, knowledge-sharing, and the instructing of traditions, myths, and medicinal practices .
Whereas there may be little direct proof of medical practices from this era, it’s cheap to imagine that Homo sapiens sapiens developed rudimentary types of medication. They seemingly supplied care to the injured and sick, experimenting with herbs and pure substances as cures. As they’d no idea of inner illnesses, their explanations of illnesses seemingly concerned the supernatural—maybe attributing illness to spirits or demons. Netzley hypothesizes that such beliefs led to the event of rituals, incantations, and prayers aimed toward appeasing these spirits .
In response to historian Fielding Hudson Garrison, primitive folks typically worshiped pure forces and parts, just like the solar, moon, and storms, which they believed have been managed by spirits. Illness was regarded as attributable to malevolent forces and will solely be cured by appeasing these spirits . Garrison explains that these early people would supply sacrifices and have interaction in rituals to thrust back illness or misfortune. They may have believed that illnesses have been attributable to human enemies with supernatural powers or by offended spirits of the useless .
Given the prevalence of respiratory illnesses immediately, it is believable that early people skilled signs just like bronchial asthma or bronchitis. Whereas these illnesses might not have existed of their present varieties, infections and environmental elements may have brought on airway irritation, resulting in respiration difficulties .
As empathy developed inside these early communities, people started to take care of each other extra attentively. Moms would consolation their youngsters after they have been harm, utilizing easy cures corresponding to making use of mud to burns or massaging sore muscle groups. These actions represented the earliest types of caregiving, laying the inspiration for extra formalized medical practices .
By the point Homo sapiens sapiens had absolutely established themselves throughout numerous areas, they’d created complicated societies with non secular beliefs, therapeutic practices, and complicated instruments. These developments mark the daybreak of drugs, which might evolve as human understanding of the physique and illness grew over time .
References:
- Netzley, Patricia D. World Historical past Sequence: The Stone Age, San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1998.
- Roberts, J.M. The Illustrated Historical past of the World: Prehistory and the First Civilizations: Quantity I, New York: Oxford College Press, 1999.
- BBC Science and Nature, “Neanderthal: Their Our bodies Had been Nicely Outfitted to Address the Ice Age,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/neanderthal_prog_summary.shtml (accessed April 4, 2013).
- Garrison, Fielding Hudson. An Introduction to the Historical past of Medication, third ed., Philadelphia and London: W.B. Saunders Firm, 1922.
- Sigerist, Henry E. Historical past of Medication: Quantity I: Primitive and Archaic Medication, New York: Oxford College Press, 1951.