How Did Ancient Humans Deal With Pain?

You have a headache, and you reach for a little white pill without a thought. For almost all of human history, that pill did not exist. So what did ancient humans actually do about pain? The answer is more inventive, more desperate, and far stranger than just suffering in silence. A willow tree that was quietly making aspirin. A flower the Sumerians called the joy plant. Holes bored into living skulls that the patients somehow survived. And the strongest painkiller of all, the one that left almost no trace, hiding in a single forty-five-thousand-year-old skeleton. This is the strange science of how humans hurt, and what we did about it, long before medicine. Sources: the Ebers Papyrus and Johann Buchner, 1828 (willow / salicin) · John Verano, Tulane University (trepanation survival) · Erik Trinkaus, Washington University in St. Louis (Shanidar 1). If you like the strange science hiding in ordinary life — the body, the brain, deep time — subscribe. New videos on the strange science of ordinary things. #ancienthumans #archaeology #neanderthal #history #popscience