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Medicinal plants are used with the intention of maintaining health, to be administered for a specific condition, or both, whether in modern medicine or in traditional medicine. [3] [47] The Food and Agriculture Organization estimated in 2002 that over 50,000 medicinal plants are used across the world. [48]
Usually, this behavior is a result of coevolution between the animal and the plant that it uses for self-medication. [5] For example, apes have been observed selecting a particular part of a medicinal plant by taking off leaves and breaking the stem to suck out the juice. [33]
Archaeological evidence indicates that the use of medicinal plants dates back to the Paleolithic age, approximately 60,000 years ago. Written evidence of herbal remedies dates back over 5,000 years to the Sumerians, who compiled lists of plants. Some ancient cultures wrote about plants and their medical uses in books called herbals.
Human uses of plants include both practical uses, such as for food, clothing, and medicine, and symbolic uses, such as in art, mythology and literature. Materials derived from plants are collectively called plant products .
The first individual to study the emic perspective of the plant world was a German physician working in Sarajevo at the end of the 19th century: Leopold Glück. His published work on traditional medical uses of plants done by rural people in Bosnia (1896) has to be considered the first modern ethnobotanical work. [18]
While many plants have been used for food, a small number of staple crops including wheat, rice, and maize provide most of the food in the world today. In turn, animals provide much of the meat eaten by the human population, whether farmed or hunted, and until the arrival of mechanised transport, terrestrial mammals provided a large part of the ...
Food webs are limited representations of real ecosystems as they necessarily aggregate many species into trophic species, which are functional groups of species that have the same predators and prey in a food web. Ecologists use these simplifications in quantitative (or mathematical representation) models of trophic or consumer-resource systems ...
Medical use of alkaloid-containing plants has a long history, and, thus, when the first alkaloids were isolated in the 19th century, they immediately found application in clinical practice. [206] Many alkaloids are still used in medicine, usually in the form of salts widely used including the following: [ 17 ] [ 207 ]