Discovering!! Fire, cooking, medicinal plants, etc.!

[Pearl]

I often wonder about how things came to be!! Like when did ancient man start cooking their food and how did they figure out to do it? Did they eat animals burned in a wildfire and decided it tasted better than raw meat?? Think about the pioneers trekking across America having to eat native plants!! Polk Sallet for instance is poisonous unless cooked! So if I ate it and got sick, I would not think, hey I'll try cooking it next time! But someone must have! And medicinal plants, there must have been a lot of trial and error!! Just curious about what everyone else thinks about these things!!

 

[Patchouli]

It’s really sad that there were medicinal plants they passed by as they traveled west, sick, dying, not knowing what could have saved their lives. Dysentery, cholera, things like that, could have been cured with the right herbs. There were a lot of situations like that in the membership of my church as they traveled west in the 1800s.

Reminds me of what a veterinarian said to me once. Wild animals know not to eat certain plants. But the tame animals have been tamed for so long that they lost that instinct to know and sometimes eat things that will kill them. I’m sorry I forget what the example was he was using, what plant, what animal.

 

[sonya123]

There are some similar plants in Europe, but other things they probably learned the hard way, if it was poisonous they died, if they lived it was ok to eat. They might have also watched Native Americans, or even animals to see what they eat

we have something called Perilla growing here all over the place. They use it a lot in Korean cooking, sort of like a mix between a mint and a nettle. I didn't know till someone was giving some of the little plants away at the farmers market

 

[sonya123]

It’s really sad that there were medicinal plants they passed by as they traveled west, sick, dying, not knowing what could have saved their lives. Dysentery, cholera, things like that, could have been cured with the right herbs. There were a lot of situations like that in the membership of my church as they traveled west in the 1800s.

Reminds me of what a veterinarian said to me once. Wild animals know not to eat certain plants. But the tame animals have been tamed for so long that they lost that instinct to know and sometimes eat things that will kill them. I’m sorry I forget what the example was he was using, what plant, what animal.

we must have posted at the same time....great minds think alike LOL, both thinking about animals! Our goats stay away from poisonous plants like goldenrod. I used to go nuts when we first started this trying to pull every last poisonous plant out of the pastures, until I noticed they don't eat them.

 

[Pearl]

It is amazing how animals are more in tune to what they can eat!!

 

[Peanut]

Domesticated livestock have lost some of this recognition ability but not all. I've seen them purposely seek out medicinal plants and eat. Then again I've seen them kill themselves by eating acorns and perilla.

Livestock don't normally seek out bad plants. It's only when they are stressed, during droughts etc. Times when their normal feed is lacking they get hungry and eat bad things.

 

[d_marsh]

All men are born with the instinct to grill and BBQ meat.

 

[Peanut]

Funny, just occurred to me… Ancient man is no different than animals during times of stress. When we got hungry we tried new things. Some results bad, we died. Some good, we discovered medicines and all sorts of uses for plants over time.

Man is smarter than critters with a better memory and the ability to reason. I don’t think it was a matter of… Ah! a new plant, think I’ll try this! That'd be stupid, ancient man wasn't stupid. At times when we got hungry or sick we tried all sorts of things.

 

[Pearl]

Funny, just occurred to me… Ancient man is no different than animals during times of stress. When we got hungry we tried new things. Some results bad, we died. Some good, we discovered medicines and all sorts of uses for plants over time.

Man is smarter than critters with a better memory and the ability to reason. I don’t think it was a matter of… Ah! a new plant, think I’ll try this! That'd be stupid, ancient man wasn't stupid. At times when we got hungry or sick we tried all sorts of things.

Animals and people (we are animals) pass along their information to the next generations!! I know animals have the ability to reason and remember! It is interesting watching the deer and Buddy! Certain grasses get eaten first, the tastier ones! The deer teach their children the best paths to the watering holes, where it's safe to sleep, etc.! But I still wonder how the first cooked meal came along?? Was Thog putting extra wood on the fire and dropped his deer leg in the fire, only to hear his wife saying that he's eating it anyway, and it was good???

 

[elkhound]

Long ago there was this man and woman and they ate from a tree...and some form of basic knowledge came into this world...both good and bad.

Theres scripture removed from bible and found in dead sea scrolls over 5,000 years old telling of a book of cures or book of medicines and it says it was cure for all diseases put on mankind.

EDIT TO AD....the above book has not been found as of yet...but i suspect theres a copy in Vatican library or portions of it.Theres also was at one time a bunch of priests living at a place in middle east and they were building warming fires with scrolls written in Hebrew. A man visiting saved ones they had in can ready to be used when he looked at one of them...so these guys could have burned a scroll copy of that book...now lost to time.

Also theres scripture that tells what these fallen angels taught mankind....it tells their names and what each taught.Theres a reference that talks about a potion drank that caused a woman to NOT HAVE have children...yes...all these thousands of years ago its referencing birth control....wont go into the rest of that...just references for view of knowledge.

Also in scripture Noah talks about the planet tilting....again in dead sea scrolls.

Fire...i believe we had it from the start....reference when Cain killed Able...they both had just done what i believe is Passover but it could be other holy days too.But anyway to do that fire is required...so first generation out of garden had fire.

 

[Canon29]

I regularly practice primitive skills- I also modify such skills to better incorporate the knowledge gained from modernity to greater effect while also always being accountable to my ability to source components from nature, this is whay i consider true self reliance... eventually I'll show people my  other survival loadout

As far as such skills go, I've also done a ton of research- One if my favorite subjects being early American frontiersman and longhunters. There is much to learn from them, though it must be noted that time and legend often distorts reality.

As far as where skills and methods came from, I am very much out to school on the progression of things. Man has ever been curious, clever and inventive. Much is believed about early man, little is truly known. For example, the current general theory on the domestication of dogs is that wolves followed camps of people around and ate scraps until they became friendly- it seems very plausible no doubt, but there's hardly any concrete evidence. For example, there is a story of Daniel Boone when he (and his party) first made it past the Cumberland gap into kentucky where wolves raided his camp and took his hat and other items. Boone killed the wolves and tried to tame the wolf pups but failed- who's to say that primitive man didn't have a similar experience, who's to say it wasn't a progression but instead a spontaneous decision?

Anyways, I think having a base skillset that is first and foremost accountable to nature itself is the finest of skills and it helps really ground oneself against the whimsy of the modern world.

 

[LadyLocust]

Who was the first person to eat an artichoke and what possessed them to do so? I love them, but if you’ve ever seen the plant, it does not look edible.

 

[Pearl]

Who was the first person to eat an artichoke and what possessed them to do so? I love them, but if you’ve ever seen the plant, it does not look edible.

Somebody was HUNGRY!!!

 

[Canon29]

A fun fact about native americans- much of their thinking was associative. Snakes were sneaky so they drew them on their moccasins for stealth- lighting was powerful and lightning struck trees made stronger weapons by their thinking. They languages developed around these associations and those languages influenced the structure of their thinking and the structure of their descendents thinking. Just speaking their languages and understanding the inherent relationship between the words changed the way you thought, invented and interacted with the world. There is so much lost that the fossil record can never hope to recover, or even define such as why or even how most practices occurred.

 

[Morgan101]

Who was the first person to eat an artichoke and what possessed them to do so? I love them, but if you’ve ever seen the plant, it does not look edible.

I would say the same thing about a lemon. Tastes like xxxx, so you put sugar on it?

There are many things like that. Who figured out which mushrooms are good and which mushrooms are bad, and at what price?