From earliest times, man has benefited from the life-enhancing properties of plants. In the most primitive periods, man utilized plants as food, medicine, shelter, and tools with which to expand knowledge and survive.
plants also held an intricate connection to man's spiritual and magical beliefs. The oldest evidence of plants utilized by humans is a 60,000 year old burial site from Mesopotamia (modem-day Iraq) that contained eight different herbs arranged about the corpse in a way to suggest the plants held spiritual as well as medicinal significance.
Though historians believe the medicinal use of herbs precede this date, the oldest remaining physical evidence is significant. The most recent evidence tells us that this use of herbs predates the invention of the wheel by roughly 56,000 years.
There can be no question as to the essential and fundamental connection of herbs and the physical and spiritual essence of human life. The oldest written record of medicinal herbs comes much later on a 5,000 year old Sumerian clay tablet that depicts several herbal remedies.
There are more than 70,000 known species of plants in existence. The therapeutic effects of each plant and combinations of plants are virtually limitless. Advancements in science and individual and controlled experimentation lead to continual discovery of value and utility of plant life.