This is Origin Stories, the Leaky Foundation podcast. I'm Meredith Johnson.

Before we get to the episode, I wanted to say thank you so much for all of your support with our matching fundraiser for Origin Stories.

We were blown away by your generosity and we're thrilled to tell you that thanks to you, we met our goal.

So thank you to Jean Bainbridge, Richard Blanchett, Bernadette Brencice, Chinzi DeSantis,

Robert Jonas, Amy Kaufman, Lutzi Lensner, Cahulmic, Kevin Miller, Charles Musiba, and 31 other donors who wanted to stay anonymous.

Today on the show, we have two stories about medicine. As humans, we have a vast toolkit of remedies to help ourselves

and each other when we're sick or injured. We don't know exactly how long we've been practicing

medicine or what medical care was like for our ancient ancestors. But there's plenty of prehistoric

evidence of individuals who survived

accidents, blunt force injuries, broken bones, and trauma of many kinds. The earliest evidence

is from about 1.7 million years ago, a homo erectus individual who had periodontal disease

and infections of the jaw.

They lost all their teeth, but they somehow survived.

How? We don't know.

But in biological anthropology, when we want to understand the roots of human behavior,

we look to our ape cousins, and it turns out that our cousins are using medicine.

Origin Stories producer Ray Pang has our stories.

A few months ago, I learned about a Sumatran orangutan named Rakuos, who has seen making and smearing a peculiar plant

paste into a fresh wound on his face. While chimps have been documented using plant medicine,

this is the first known instance of an orangutan treating a wound with plants. To learn more about

Rakus, I called up Karelian Shupli, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute.

The Arachus is one of the orangutans we have observed for many years at our study site.

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