Were Hunter-Gatherers Healthier Than Farmers? What the Bones Tell Us
The Cursed Harvest: When Farming Made Women Sick Agriculture wasn’t a gift from the gods. For the first women who tried it, it was a…
Care & Healing
What Neanderthals Chewed for Pain Relief
I have walked past yarrow a hundred times without noticing it. It grows in meadow margins and along roadsides across temperate Europe, unremarkable to the…
What Stone Age Women Burned to Repel Mosquitoes (You Can Grow It)
The evidence is literally in their teeth. When researchers examined dental calculus—that mineralized plaque your dentist scrapes away—from human remains at Qesem Cave in Israel,…
The Healer’s Bedding: 77,000 Years of Sleeping Smart
She bypassed abundant, perfectly comfortable plant material in favor of specific species with specific chemical properties. The healer who selected insecticidal leaves was practising applied…
The First Doctors Were Women: Evidence for Healing in the Stone Age
Stone Age healing wasn’t superstition — it was applied botany, surgery, and pharmacy. And the evidence for who practiced it points in a direction that…
When Survival Took Time: Care, injury, and long-term healing before modern medicine
Many of us think that care-giving is a modern age idea. However some Stone Age individuals survived injuries that would have prevented walking or hunting,…