Full transcript
0:00Have you ever wondered where botany comes from?
0:04Its origins date back to the Neolithic Revolution,
0:07when hunter-gatherer communities settled down and began to domesticate plants.
0:13Over time, agriculture led to a new sedentary lifestyle
0:17and to the development of the earliest civilizations.
0:21With the advent of writing, botanical knowledge started to be recorded
0:25and not just transmitted orally from one generation to the next.
0:29One of the oldest medical texts is Ebers Papyrus,
0:33composed in Ancient Egypt, around 1500 B.C.
0:36It contains magical formulas and folk remedies
0:40such as aloe vera, the "plant of immortality".
0:43Its healing properties were well-known at the time, so much
0:46that Queen Nefertiti used aloe vera in her beauty routine.
0:52Around the same period,
0:53the Vedas appeared in India: these epic poems contain
0:57all the philosophical and medical knowledge of those ancient peoples.
1:01As a science, botany was officially born with the Greeks.
1:05We'll find out in the next episode of "Pioneering botanists and their times".