Stone Age Medicine

According to archaeologists, the first time Stonehenge was used by humans was about 8,000 years ago - a short time after the glaciers had melted and retreated, and long before the Trypilians had built their cities north of the newly formed Black Sea. Thus, someone traveling through England 10,000 years ago set up a healing centre or an astronomy centre - for ancient ancestors who were our fabled 'watchers of the sky'.

These people were not entirely at the mercy of the elements. They understood the benefit of specific herbs and also could use a scalpel as was obviously required in those dangerous times. They, moreso, and based on evidence of trepanation, had skilled brain surgeons among them. Their patients in fact survived these painful operations without further infection.

The oldest trepanned skull, found at a neolithic burial site of Ensisheim in France, is more than 7,000 years old, and trepanation was practised by the Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Indians, Romans, Greeks and the early Mesoamerican civilizations.


When Otzi the Iceman had his 5,300 year-old stomach contents analized, scientists found six types of moss - some with apparent medicinal qualities. One type of moss found, Sphagnum Imbricatum, is a natural antiseptic.

Skulls dated to 7,000BC excavated recently in western Pakistan have been found to have holes drilled into their molars. At least nine people living in a village in Mehrgarh, near the Bolan river in Balochistan, had holes drilled into their molars and appeared to have survived the procedure, evidence of Neolithic dentistry.

China’s Neolithic archaeology began with the 1921 discovery of Yangshao culture in Henan Province. Since 1977, pre-Yangshao (10,000 BP to 6950 BP) cultures such as those at Cishan, Peiligang and Dadiwan have been found in the Yellow River Valley, filling the missing link in archaeological chronology and offering resources for the study of the origin of agriculture, animal husbandry and pottery production.

A pottery cauldron containing boiled medicinal herbs unearthed in 2001 in Zhejiang Province indicates that Neolithic people used natural herbal medicine as early as 8,000 years ago.

Several new studies have found that taking devil's claw (an herb used for
thousands of years by the Khoisan peoples of the Kalahari Desert) can substantially reduce pain and improves physical functioning in people with osteoarthritis. In a large, well-designed 4-month study including 122 people with knee and hip osteoarthritis, devil's claw root powder reduced pain and improved functional ability as effectively as standard doses of a leading medication for osteoarthritis.

Physical evidence has confirmed that ancient Chinese were producing fermented, wine-like drinks from rice, honey and fruit as early as in 7,000 BC according to scientists who are examining residues of the ancient shards of pottery from a Neolithic site in north China. Before the Jiahu discovery, the earliest evidence for an alcoholic drink in human history was the resinated wine inside two jars excavated at Hajji Firuz Tepe, Iran, dating to about 5,400 BC.