Ancient biology... part 1

Until then, men and their ancestors of other times died in a very similar way to that of most other representatives of the animal world: abandoned by their companions if they were too weak to continue the march or to participate in a hunting party ; they were voluntarily separated from the group to wait for their end alone and in a secluded place; unconscious victims of an unforeseen natural catastrophe, of hunger, of the attack of a ferocious beast or of any mysterious disease. Therefore, death was considered a fearful, omnipresent risk, which needed to be avoided if possible. The only means that man had at his disposal to be able to face this problem serenely was to develop a belief in an unearthly life. Convinced that his life should be prolonged after death, when venerating the dead, man began to populate the ghost environment, to discover the world of the spirits of which were also part animals, plants and frequently unexplained phenomena that were they produced in nature. In a word, I include everything that was part of the environment of man in his daily life. The spirits, fluttering in space, they watch over him, protect him in adversity, but sometimes they also punished him with misfortunes and illnesses and for that reason it was a price to invoke the spirits, respect them, honor them condions and propitiatory sacrifices.

Therefore, the sorcerer became the most important character in the village; the only representation that we have of a sorcerer was discovered in a wall of the grotto of Trois Freres, in the French Pyrenees: with the face hidden behind a bearded mask, the head crowned by branched deer horns, the hechiecero performs a dance perhaps to ingratiate oneself with the protecting deity of hunting or to drive away the captive spirits whom he believed responsible for some misfortune. From this moment the sorcerer, the one who communicates with the spirits, was also the learned man of the tribe: a little doctor, something surgeon, pharmacist in part, knowledgeable of the secrets hidden in the world of nature. This inevitably led him to expand, day after day, his knowledge of the human body (which sought to restore health), animals (whose organs were sacrificed to the deities) and plants (which collected and mixed in tea and infusions miraculous).

We have direct evidence, proportioned in part by fossils, of trepan skulls (perhaps to remove the demon from the head of the patient), of fractured limbs recomposed again with stakes and ligatures, of amputations performed in case of poisoning, of bites or of gangrene due to unhealed wounds. In addition, cave paintings have been found in which the organs of the slaughtered animals are produced with great detail, and it was thought that through this it was possible to obtain a large number of information about the fate of the people and the tribe.

As the prehistory of man becomes history despite the influence of superstitions, the knowledge obtained and transmitted in the course of the centuries that make more and more numerous and precise. In ancient Egypt, 2000 years before Jesus Christ, the technique of embalming was so perfect that evidently the practical knowledge of human anatomy must be very advanced, especially (and at least as documented in the papyri documents) in relation to the external anatomy; There was also a lack of knowledge of medicine, of a sometimes surprising modernity, derived from daily experience, such as the advice to supply seeds of poppy to the infant who could not sleep or who did not want to sleep, and also to bottle the body with Cat fat in order to avoid being bitten during sleep by mice.
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Around the year 1920 BC, in ancient Babylon, King Hammurabi collected in the codex that bears his name a series of detailed rules related to the medical profession: the doctor was still a priest who, before pronouncing himself, examined the viscera of sacrificed animals or cured with primitive means that were halfway between the magical and the scientific.
This situation remained practically unchanged for many centuries among peoples whose civilization was gradually settled: Cretans, Mycenaeans and Greeks, for whom diseases were caused by the darts of the god Apollo suddenly enraged, and it was only possible to attend after appeasing the deity .