Hey, it's Flora and you're listening to Science Friday.

If you try to look up where medicine originated or the earliest medical interventions,

you'll probably find yourself reading about ancient Greece or Egypt or Mesopotamia.

But what about before that? Like way before that?

How did early humans treat disease or cope with injuries? What did a Neanderthal do if she broke a

rib or needed a root canal? Was there prehistoric health care? Today we're digging into those

questions and what these medical

interventions tell us about our ancient relatives and how the practice of medicine evolved.

Here to field all things medical is Dr. Penny Spikens. She studies the origins of medicine and

health care at York University in England. And if you're going to talk about ailments, you cannot sleep on teeth. So for our dental needs, we have Dr. Laura Wyrick, who studies ancient

oral microbiomes at Penn State University. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having us.

Yeah. Thank you. It's brilliant to be here. Penny, what's the oldest evidence of medical care? Oh, that's a fantastic

question. Well, I think it depends how you define medical care because actually we might not be

the only species that have medical care if you're quite broad about your definition. Because when we

look at our sort of cousins,

chimpanzees, our nearest living cousins, chimpanzees with whom we share a common ancestor

sort of seven to eight million years ago, they have some practices that we might begin

to call medical care.

That is like, you know, if they've got internal parasites, they can pick some really, really sort of spiky leaves to eat deliberately to kind of flush out those internal parasites.

And they can also use leaves to kind of dress wound dressings, not just on themselves, but on other chimps.

So it may be that actually when you say how far back does it go, it's like, ooh, could be more than 7 to 8 million years, really.

Well, as always the question is more complicated than it seems, it sounds like.

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