Chimpanzees observed applying and giving medicine | Hacker News Reader

Chimpanzees observed applying and giving medicine

sapiens.org

169 pointsHooke69 comments

Every indigenous tradition out there has stories about learning medicine from animals. I don't know how we're still surprised when we find these things out.

I mean, just look at this:

> Humans have been using local remedies (such as roots, leaves, bark, and other animals) as medicine for at least 5,000 years, a practice that has been passed down over generations within societies all over the world.

"At least 5000 years"? What possible realistic view of humans has us discovering medicinal herbs for the first time in 3000BC?

We have archeological evidence for the last 5K years. While humans or our ancestors may have used herbs for literally millions of years as the article implies, we do not have any evidence for it.

There is a fine line between medicine and eating what you need to survive. Reality is that all animals, even single cell animals, know what to eat. Treating scurvy, is as simple as eating fruit and there is naturally evidence that we have been doing that since as long as we were unable to synthesise it.

What's more interesting is that humans have forgotten how. Not that animals haven't.

Given the covid context its interesting that we have lost the ability to self medicate based on learning. I find it difficult to grok that in parts of Africa and the United States of America a huge number of humans have lost the ability to eat healthily.

There is a difference between eating random plants and relying on evolution to spread the trait of eating something beneficial and recognizing that a particular herb was useful for a particular symptom, then recognizing that symptom in others and passing the herb to them.

But that's why this is so silly - because the baseline assumption is that we did Not do that, and so we "only have evidence" for the last 5000 years. It would be stranger if early humans Didn't do this. It's like saying we've only got evidence for humans eating food for the last 10,000 years.

Archaeology's more than happy to make assumptions - the running jokes in the field about "for ritual use" and "Sappho and her pal" are testament to that, but the baseline view of the world embedded in those assumptions is absolutely absurd and archaic.

It is not silly. It could be that wide spread and persistent use of herbs required a certain level of population density and people traveling far to spread the word and learn from others. That is why observing apes doing that was important since it showed that practice could be sustainable among early ancestors of humans.

> It could be that wide spread and persistent use of herbs required a certain level of population density and people traveling far to spread the word and learn from others.

It could be, but that's an assumption. Again, the null hypothesis being posited is "premodern humans didn't do this, unless proven otherwise," which is absolutely an assumption, and one already derived from a distinctly unique mode of human experience, i.e. Urban dweller in a high population. Even at the time that scholars were developing the mental models that have continued today to make the field willingly blind to actual human existence, most humans lived in one ecosystem over a long period of time and passed down oral folklore about medicinal herbs.

By and large, for most of human history, most humans lived in the same bioregion as their ancestors and their ancestors' ancestors. The notion that they didn't know how the plants, animals, and other natural phenomenon operated in their environment - that they were so incurious and stupid as to not gain facility with their land, and so incurious, stupid, and antisocial as to not share this information by default - is absolutely an assumption made by the field, one that's belied by enormous amounts of oral mythological, horticultural, and medicinal tradition among every single culture we know of, including the culture of the people who founded the field, and frankly, one that's led to Anthropology's rather poor historical record vis-a-vis native cultures and racism. It's a practice of willful blindness akin to John Miur cropping natives out of his picture of Yosemite because he wanted to capture the "untrammeled wilderness" and couldn't see what he was really looking at.

We have a lot of archeological evidence that at least from the end of ice age people did travel long distances within short period of time, like several hundreds of miles or more. That implies exchange of information on much greater scale then it was possible with a small group leaving in a designated area. Yet we do not have evidence of such travel before the last ice age . Similarly humans started to live in a big villages only after the last ice age according to existing evidence. And again, bigger group implies faster spread of information.

So assuming, as with other activities, that widespread use of herbs to treat specific illness did not happen before the last ice age was a reasonable null hypothesis.

You’re assuming that there’s a small number of herbs discovered a limited number of times and spread over a large geographic region, as opposed to a large variety of potentially beneficial plants discovered multiple times independently by people who spent literally their entire lives, for generations, interacting with their surroundings. Yes, if someone discovered aspirin, and you want to know if it ever reached another continent, your model is useful; if your question is generally “did humans intentionally consume bioactive plants with knowledge of their effects”, I can pretty confidently say the answer is “yes” for any group of humans who spent even a generation living in the same place. Again, these folks lived primarily forager lifestyle, in which they had to know which plants they could eat or they would literally starve to death. They knew their environment.

My older dog seeks out and eats the same wild herb consistently when she has stomach problems. This is not like grass eating in that it does not induce vomiting. I see my younger dog observing and then imitating. These ideas that humans have "unique behaviours" seem really outdated, the assumption should be reversed.

Does he imitate only when having stomach problems ?

How do you/he recognize stomach problems in the older dog?

All these things are highly anecdotal obviously. But the younger dog seems to try it out whenever my older dog does it. I can tell my older dog is having stomach problems by lack of appetite and/or energy, which I doubt my younger dog can consciously link to stomach problems. But who knows, their sense of smell is inconceivably better than ours, maybe they can smell each others' ailments to an extent.

This does not imply that dogs have a theory of mind.

It could simply be mimicry and behaviourism.

It is notoriously difficult to distinguish between behaviouristic arguments and more involved, theory of mind ones.

Consider the anecdote where a dog was forbidden into the living room. After a while, while the owner was reading his newspaper, the dog appeared at his feet. Surprised, he ordered the dog out and then observed it sneaking inside while walking on its heels, since the tapping of the dog's nails on the floor was what alerted him to the dog's entrance.

Did the dog explicitly think that, hey, it must be the sound of my nails on the hard floor that alerts his attention ?

Or did the dog through a semi-random trial and error saw that when it was walking on its heels, the owners attention was not provoked, thus started doing that ?

(example borrowed from the book "Baboon metaphysics")

Not theory of mind but rather trial-and-error and seeking out and remembering what works. And maybe it's passed on from generation to generation merely by imitation.

I wouldn't put it past a dog to understand that making less noise lets him sneak where he's not wanted. It's basic hunting behavior.

When I was a kid our cat taught our dog how to open a door that was slightly ajar, reaching round with a paw to pull it open. She even closed it again so the dog could practice.

It is always slightly amusing to read these articles of researchers discovering we're not the only intelligent species on earth, that insects can learn, that other mammals can transmit knowledge, use tools etc.

I have learned a lot from watching my chickens, my dog and my cats - they self medicate with specific plants (for example, chewing Tansy[1] leaves, which is a powerful medicine, or any of the myriad other wild herbs growing in our garden), and they learn from each other which plants are the interesting ones. I don't know that this behavior has an intellectual, cerebral aspect, but it's certainly there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tansy

I mean, dogs and cats both will eat grass to encourage throwing up.

And cats are sensitive to certain plants (cat grass, valerian), they're recreational drugs for them.

Slime molds, that are single cell life that can live as collective entities can learn. This is truly astounding to me. Philip K Dick has written a book with a slim mold as a character. ;) So, it seems that no brain is needed to learn.

In the south of Brazil, where I live, Howler Monkeys (locally called "bugios") have been observed to chew a plant and apply it to wounds.

Important quote: > researchers do not yet know which insects were used, if they have any associated chemical properties or, most importantly, whether applying them to wounds has any health benefits.

So it’s not known if the medicine is actually medicine or not

Which potentially makes their knowledge, in this specific case, greater than ours.

Why? Might just be placebo.

But in any case, obviously chimpanzees have some areas of greater knowledge than we do. Eg I am sure any chimpanzee knows where the tastiest leaves are much better than I do.

>> Which potentially makes their knowledge, in this specific case, greater than ours.

> Why? Might just be placebo.

I'm not GP but I believe the word "potentially" in their sentence means exactly that: it might just be placebo, but it also might be that they know something we don't.

GP here: Yes, thanks. Plus it should be a bit obvious that knowledge of insects with pharmaceutical properties (objective) is not, in fact, the same thing as "knowledge" of what the "tastiest leaves are" (subjective).

to be fair, we were curing people with mercury not too long ago, so I say it still counts

Let's take a step back: Chimpanzees may be using medicine! How is the efficacy of their medicine a question? Didn't you read the chimps' double-blind trial results (published in Nature, of course)? If the chimps built an airplane, would we say 'but it doesn't fly'?

Or in case you mean you are an anti-chimp-vaxxer: In this case I agree: Don't trust chimp medicine! It's a fraud!

> Don't trust chimp medicine! It's a fraud!

The Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is built on the platform ChAdOx1. So named because it's a Chimpanzee Adenovirus tweaked by Oxford and thus was their first attempt (at least, the first that was worth testing in humans).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChAdOx1

Although the RNA vaccines are the most famous demo of a new vaccine trick since the pandemic began, the next tier of COVID-19 vaccines were a different speed-up platform, find a virus that can successfully infect humans but doesn't do anything interesting (Adenoviruses are not a big deal) then bulk re-program it to make the protein you want to immunise against instead of copies of itself, tada - custom vaccine. It is unclear how re-usable this idea is exactly, but a pandemic was the perfect time to try it as scale.

The idea of the GP is that if you know the exact plant, it's possible to make a chemical analysis if it and try to find a known drug that is produced by the plant and has been tested in humans or animals.

Humans use a lot of snake oil, probably chimps too. Preregistered double blind randomized controlled clinical trials that are good enough to be published in a serious peer review journal is a trick to avoid that.

Determining if some medical treatment is useful is very difficult. It may sound like a good idea, but it may be ineffective. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronary_stent#Controversy

There could be an analgesic or anesthetic element without providing health benefits per se.

That means they’re even more similar to us given that humans practiced “medicine” that quite often didn’t help in a good chunk of the cases for a large part of their history.

Hmm, if there's no health effects, looking to similar practices humans do, it may well be an arcane religious ritual that is performed. Even more profound. /s

The idea of some chimps that uses alternative medicine because they fell for the marketing and are now homeopaths is somehow hilarious to me. I would imagine this makes us and chimps much more alike than if they just used actual medicine.

From what I've heard about chimps, are we sure they were "giving medicine" rather than "attempting unsuccessfully to poison"? :)

They're pretty similar concepts. Either way, they're administering drugs to affect health.

Apparently a mother was seen applying an insect to her child. I doubt she would purposefully poison her own offspring.

Didn't get further that "self medication is unique to humans". Cows do it, even for ailments that have not occurred in one generation, I.É. It is sometimes instinctual knowledge, everyone with a cat knows that cats do it.

For cats, is it the eating plants and inducing vomiting to remove hairballs thing?

Yep and using saliva to heal wounds, and eating properly. That from the top of my head. I would not be surprised if there are other known behaviours. Most humans have forgotten about licking wounds, it works for humans too, even if mum slaps your wrist for doing it and applies big pharma products ;)

Apparently saliva contains natural painkillers which is interesting to think about as an incentive for animals to lick their wounds that evolved: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10514-natural-born-pa...

This topic was also covered by the BBC radio show CrowdScience in March 2021: Do animals use medicine?

As they delve into the topic, researchers reveals their observations and findings. It's pretty amazing. The programme/podcast is well worth a listen:

Do animals use medicine? (March 2021) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszv77

> Presenter Anand Jagatia speaks with the primate researcher who stumbled across a chimp chewing on a bitter leaf 35 years ago, Professor Mike Huffman, whose observations opened up a whole new field of research. We discover why plants contain the medicinal compounds they do, and how butterflies with brains no bigger than a pin-head are still able to select and use medicine to protect their young.

> We think of medicine as a human invention - but it turns out that we’ve learnt a lot of what we know from copying the birds, bugs and beasts.

Here's the paper if anyone is interested: https://oa.mg/work/10.1016/j.cub.2021.12.045

It's sad to know I will not see where evolution will take them, even worse is not knowing if they will have a chance to evolve in the years to come

Let them evolve and you end up with humans

This makes the very false assumption that evolution has some linear path that it always trends towards.

In this case they're pretty far along that road, though. It seems unlikely they'd evolve away from a very similar brain structure or hand structure to us, for example.

This implies that our brain and hand structure are the most crucial characteristics. There's been endless claims in the scientific literature about this or that physical feature or behavior, but it's all extremely speculative and lacking in both evidence and theoretical power.

We can't even clearly articulate what distinguishes human faculties or behavior. Every time someone proposes a definition (e.g. tool use) and then tries to collect evidence (e.g. opposable thumbs, abstract modeling, etc), the definition falls apart as people identify analogous faculties, behavior, and capabilities elsewhere. I think it's self-evident that human faculties and behavior have a fundamentally and categorically superior characteristic. Others think that our failure to so far find it suggests that it doesn't exist. (Not sure how to square that with reality beyond simply suggesting that human civilization is purely and continuously accidental, or perhaps that a constructed spacefaring capability isn't meaningfully different from other behaviors.) Either way, we're still rather ignorant about what we are. And even if we could articulate it, we'd still need to understand why and how human evolution unfolded as it did as there may be a filter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter) making convergent evolution of human-like intelligence unlikely even if evolution were directed somehow. So we can't meaningfully say anything about how "far along" chimpanzees or any other species might be.

Pan troglodytes have evolved for precisely as long as homo sapiens have.

Nope. Apes are "cousins" to humans regarding evolution, and secondly evolution isn't some linear thing where everyone eventually evolves into humans.

So it's unlikely that they evolve into very human like species

'end up'?

Humans are evolving today. So are chimps, crocodiles and coronaviruses. There's no end, no objective. Just reproduction with variation under selection pressure.

This misconception comes from "the great chain of being"[1]. It's an old idea which still influences us to see evolution as a ladder.

Evolution doesn't work like that though. It's a process that finds local optima for fitness by randomly exploring a very high dimensional space. It moves in myriad directions; there is no single ladder to climb "up".

E.g. for humans, our evolutionary path looks like it selected for increased intelligence. For mycoplasma, it selected for the organism to be as simple as possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_chain_of_being

Animals are more like us than we realize, just simpler.

Every year as we learn more and how better to relate to them, understand all their modes, means of communication, I am more convinced my initial statement above is accurate.

Couldn't agree more. People think that humans are more intelligent because we learnt to speak, but it's really language itself that makes us smart in the sense of making us universal problem solvers. Animals are conscious creatures which can and do solve problems in novel situations.

Indeed. What I would give for a mind meld, some sense of mind.

What would we find?

With senses, maybe more like some autistic people able to pick a small sound out of noise. More raw, faster...

Fewer, or maybe no abstractions. Direct, thought is action. Like they flow very easily.

Who knows!

Yet again monkey news is proven true. Just waiting for proof of the chimp that stole a car and drove to spain

(I know this'll be downvoted, I cant imagine the HN crowd are particularly big monkey news fans, but I had to)

Setí is great, but there is clearly so much terrestrial intelligence we have yet to discover and so much more that we are killing.

It's crazy that someone claiming to be a scientist in the area of animal self medication is so unaware of what I consider common knowledge, so limited in intellectual resource that they can't Google "animal self medication", and so vain as to think something they have observed is original work without attempting to verify that.

Think you responded to the wrong person :)

Either that or we're talking about a different monkey news lol

Next up, bears discover fire: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/bears-discover-fi...

I feel that any species can attain sapience given a million years or two.

There are quite a few species that have lasted much longer than two million years.

e.g.: https://www.oldest.org/animals/species/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/respect-sharks-are...

edit: Just to be clear, I wasn't disputing the idea in essence. I do think that a large fraction of species (especially mammalian species) have the potential to gain sentience over that time-span, given the right selective pressures.

We are 98.4 identical genetically with chimpanzees. In other words, if another entity, not humans, created the biological kingdom taxonomy we would end up being called the same species.

We can't reproduce viable offspring with chimps, so no, we wouldn't be characterized as one species in any conventional meaning of the word.

This is an oft proclaimed bad take, because there is no point of reference for this comparison.

Humans are 95% identical with dogs, are we mostly dog? We're 60% identical with bananas, are we really all just part of the banana family?

Clearly the answer is no. Broad genetic similarity is just a bad metric.

Could you use dog's blood for transfusion? No. But you could use chimpanzee blood in humans.

This is like looking at statically compiled binaries of some FPS game and Office suite and concluding "these are 90% similar because most of the code is standard libraries".

I once read this article that the Neanderthals were aware of the antibiotic properties of penicillin and used this to heal themselves. They knew some mosses (with penicillin fungi) had healing properties.

They discovered this tens of thousands of years before Modern Man discovered it!!

So this doesn't really surprise me at all.

Chimps are evolving and will soon reach human (homo sapiens) intelligence level. Planet of the apes incoming....

Chimps got coronavirus and it boosted their brain power.

(/s, joke)

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