The Iceman carried a fungus, and America’s first drug list was two-thirds plants

Key takeaways

• About 5,300 years ago, Ötzi the Iceman carried two pieces of birch fungus on hide strips, and the museum that keeps him assumes they were for healing¹³.
• A famous Neanderthal “flower burial” in Iraq now looks more like the work of nesting bees, a 2023 study concluded⁴.
• Written plant medicine runs from Mesopotamian records of about 2600 BCE through Egypt’s Ebers Papyrus, China’s Shennong Herbal, India’s Charaka Samhita, Dioscorides and Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine⁶⁵⁹.
• In 1820, 145 of the 217 drugs on the first U.S. Pharmacopeia’s main list were plants or came from plants, and many had been used by American Indians¹¹¹².
• Long use pointed scientists to real medicines, but some old ideas, like reading a plant’s shape as a clue to its use, didn’t hold up²⁶¹⁵.

On September 19, 1991, two German hikers, Erika and Helmut Simon, came across a body on the Tisenjoch Pass in the Ötztal Alps³. The man had died about 5,300 years earlier³.

Among his gear were two pieces of birch polypore, a birch fungus, threaded onto strips of hide¹. The South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Italy, which keeps his body, says it is assumed the fungus served a healing purpose¹. People still used it as medicine in the 20th century, and it is said to fight bacteria and stop bleeding¹.

Notice the careful words: assumed, said to. That is the honest shape of plant-medicine history. Some of it is well documented, some is educated guessing, and some favorite stories have fallen apart under a closer look.

This article follows that long story, from prehistory to the first U.S. drug standards. Our article on plant-derived medicines tells how specific plants became modern drugs.

A famous Neanderthal “flower burial” now has a likelier explanation: bees

One of archaeology’s most touching stories comes from Shanidar Cave in Iraq. Clumps of pollen turned up with a Neanderthal skeleton known as Shanidar 4. The excavator read them as flowers placed on the grave⁴.

That find helped shape a picture of Neanderthals as people with empathy much like ours⁴.

In 2023, a team led by archaeologist Chris Hunt of Liverpool John Moores University took a fresh look in the Journal of Archaeological Science⁴. They concluded that nesting solitary bees probably carried in at least some of the pollen, though other processes may also have played a part⁴.

The burial itself still matters. Shanidar 4 belongs to a cluster of remarkably complete Neanderthal skeletons that were deliberately placed⁴. What fell apart was the flower evidence.

A beautiful story can outlive its evidence for decades. Remember that whenever a remedy is sold as ancient.

The oldest written remedies are lists of plants

Once people could write, plant remedies were among the first things they recorded. A 2013 review by natural-products researchers Gordon Cragg and David Newman sums up the earliest records⁶.

• Mesopotamia, about 2600 BCE. Records describe about 1,000 plant-derived substances, including oils of cedar and cypress, licorice, myrrh and poppy juice⁶.
• Egypt, about 1500 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus documents more than 700 drugs, most of them from plants⁶.
• China, about 100 BCE. The Shennong Herbal, as the review dates it, lists 365 drugs. By 659 CE, the Tang Herbal had grown to 850⁶.

India’s Ayurvedic tradition has its own foundational text, the Charaka Samhita, a broad work on medicine traditionally credited to the physician Charaka as its main author and compiler⁵. Our article on old healing philosophies explains the ideas behind Ayurveda.

These texts are treasures. They are also records of what healers used, not tests of what worked. Their value today is as leads: a list of plants that generations of people found worth writing down.

A Greek doctor’s plant book guided medicine for about 16 centuries

Dioscorides was a Greek physician from Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey⁷. He traveled with Roman armies and recorded how to collect, store and use medicinal herbs⁶.

His De Materia Medica, written between about 50 and 70 CE, filled five books on how to prepare, judge and test drugs⁷. It described about 500 substances⁸. For roughly 16 centuries, physicians from Europe to the Middle East treated it as their main guide to plants and drugs⁷.

Dioscorides asked readers to judge his work by the care behind it. He said he had examined most of the herbs himself and had questioned local people about them⁷. That was a scientific instinct, and later writers took it further.

Scholars writing in Arabic preserved the plant canon and made it bigger

Through Europe’s early Middle Ages, scholars in the Islamic world preserved Greek and Roman medical knowledge and expanded it⁶. Physicians writing in Arabic had Dioscorides in translation, along with Galen’s book on simple remedies, whose alphabetical layout most Arabic drug books followed⁸.

They didn’t just copy. By the 800s, they were using drugs unknown to Greek medicine, such as camphor and musk⁸. Because the plants differed from region to region, they wrote glossaries matching drug names across languages, and traders and travelers mattered as much as Greek books⁸.

Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was born in Bukhara in 980 and died in Hamadan, in present-day Iran, in 1037⁹. His Canon of Medicine has five books. The second lists about 800 individual drugs of plant and mineral origin, and the fifth gives some 650 compound remedies⁹.

Gerard of Cremona translated the Canon into Latin in the 1100s, and it stayed part of Europe’s standard medical curriculum until the late 1600s⁹. For centuries, a European medical student learning about plant drugs was partly learning from a scholar born in Central Asia.

Ibn al-Baytar, from Málaga in what is now Spain, died in 1248 after writing the most comprehensive Arabic drug reference of its kind⁸. It covers more than 1,400 medicines in 2,324 entries and draws on more than 260 written sources⁸.

Renaissance Europe checked old books, borrowed new plants and still read “signatures”

In 1544 and 1554, the Italian physician Pier Andrea Mattioli published commentaries that piled his own observations onto Dioscorides’ text⁷. On plantain, Dioscorides wrote four lines and Mattioli more than 30⁷. By the 1560s, observing, testing and publishing new data had become the norm in plant and drug research⁷.

New plants poured in, too. The Portuguese physician Garcia da Orta sailed to Goa, in India, in 1534 and learned from local physicians, healers, yogis and merchants¹⁰. His 1563 book spread across Europe in Latin, Italian, French and German¹⁰. In Seville, Nicolás Monardes described American plants such as tobacco and coca without ever leaving Europe, and he accepted almost every story travelers told him¹⁰.

Not every idea of the era was about checking. The physician Paracelsus, who lived from 1493 to 1541, is credited with the doctrine of signatures. It held that a plant’s look, color, taste or smell pointed to the illness it could treat². Lungwort’s spotted leaves were thought to look like lungs, so it was given for chest complaints².

In 1652, the London healer and astrologer Nicholas Culpeper published The English Physitian, the herbal often called his Complete Herbal¹⁵². It was cheap, written in English for ordinary readers, and a bestseller that stayed in print into the 1700s¹⁵. A 2024 study found that about 92% of its plant entries came wholly or mostly from the apothecary John Parkinson’s earlier books¹⁵. Culpeper also tied each herb to a ruling planet and believed signatures were God-given clues¹⁵.

Signatures don’t hold up. Historians now see them mostly as memory aids for remedies people had found by trial and error, not as the reason any remedy worked¹⁵. Modern medicine has no use for the idea².

America’s first official drug list was mostly plants, many of them Native remedies

On January 1, 1820, 11 physicians met in the Old Senate Chamber of the U.S. Capitol to create a national drug standard, the U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP)¹³. The first edition appeared by the end of that year¹³.

Plants dominated it. A 2024 overview by USP experts counts 217 drugs on the main list, 145 of them plants or plant-derived, about two-thirds¹². A second list of 71 drugs included 67 botanicals¹². Counts vary a little by historian; one USP history lists 221 main entries¹³.

Many of those plants came from Native healers, and the credit rarely traveled with them. Historian Virgil Vogel counted 296 entries in the 1820 Pharmacopeia and found that 130 of them, nearly all from plants, were drugs American Indians used¹¹. In all, he estimated that about 220 drugs of Native use made it into the official U.S. drug books¹¹.

That reliance lasted a long time. Until about the 1930s, most medicines were made from plants¹².

Then the shift came quickly. The 1936 revision dropped fluidextracts and tinctures, and in the 1940s synthetic compounds began replacing plant and mineral drugs¹³. By the 1965 edition, only 30 substances of Native origin remained¹¹.

The story didn’t end there. In 1995, the USP added a section on nutritional supplements, and in 2002 it set safety criteria for admitting dietary supplement standards¹³. The plants came back, this time as supplements with quality standards, not as drugs. For the 19th-century botanical movements in between, see our history of natural health movements in America.

Pan American plants still travel north. The 2024 overview, whose co-authors include staff of supplement and testing companies, lists cat’s claw and maca from Peru and boldo from Chile among botanicals used in supplements¹². Our article on traditional knowledge explores credit and benefit-sharing.

From Shanidar to the pharmacopeia in 15 rows

This timeline gathers the milestones above in one place.

When	Who or what	Key idea	What we know now
Neanderthal times	Shanidar 4, Iraq4	Pollen read as funeral flowers4	Nesting bees probably carried in some of it4
About 5,300 years ago	Ötzi the Iceman, Alps3	Carried birch fungus on hide strips1	Healing use assumed, not proven1
About 2600 BCE	Mesopotamian records	About 1,000 plant substances6	Among the earliest written drug records6
About 1500 BCE	Ebers Papyrus, Egypt	More than 700 drugs, mostly plants6	A record of practice, not a test of results
About 100 BCE	Shennong Herbal, China	365 drugs6	Grew to 850 in the Tang Herbal of 659 CE6
About 50–70 CE	Dioscorides	About 500 substances in five books78	Central reference for about 16 centuries7
By the 800s	Physicians writing in Arabic	Added drugs such as camphor and musk8	Knowledge grew through trade and travel8
Before 1037	Ibn Sina’s Canon	About 800 plant and mineral drugs9	Taught in Europe until the late 1600s9
Died 1248	Ibn al-Baytar, Málaga	More than 1,400 medicines8	Drew on more than 260 sources8
1554	Mattioli’s Latin commentary	Added his own observations7	Observation became the standard by the 1560s7
1563	Garcia da Orta, Goa	Learned from local healers10	Spread across Europe in translation10
1652	Culpeper’s herbal, London	Cheap English guide; planets and “signatures”15	Signatures seen today as memory aids, not science15
1820	First U.S. Pharmacopeia	145 of 217 main drugs from plants12	130 substances had Native use, by one count11
1936 to 1965	USP revisions	Tinctures dropped; synthetics rose13	Just 30 Native-origin substances left11
1995	USP 23	Supplement section added13	Supplement safety criteria followed in 200213

Tradition pointed to real drugs, and the famous 80% figure is shakier

You may have seen the claim that 80% of the world relies on traditional medicine. Before repeating it, look at where such figures come from and what year they describe.

Cragg and Newman’s 2013 review cites a different number. It says the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated in 1985 that about 65% of the world’s population relied mainly on plant-based traditional medicine for primary care⁶.

The same review contains a second, more useful 80%. Of 122 plant-derived compounds used in medicine, 80% were used for the same or related purposes as in traditional medicine, and they came from only 94 plant species⁶.

That is a striking point in tradition’s favor: healers’ long observation pointed researchers to real biological activity again and again. But both percentages are decades old, and neither tells you whether a particular herb works or is safe for you.

Here is how several historical claims rate on our four-level evidence scale.

Claim	Evidence level	What the record shows
Traditional use pointed to many plant-based drugs	Strong evidence	80% of 122 plant-derived compounds matched traditional uses6
Ötzi used his birch fungus as medicine	Not enough evidence	Plausible, but the museum calls it an assumption1
“80% of the world relies on traditional medicine” as a precise, current fact	Not enough evidence	A 1985 WHO estimate, as cited in 2013, was about 65%6
Neanderthals at Shanidar buried their dead with flowers	Evidence says no, or unsafe	Pollen was probably carried in by bees4
A plant’s shape or color reveals what it treats	Evidence says no, or unsafe	Signatures likely served as memory aids for remedies found by trial and error15
Herbal products are safe because they are natural or traditional	Evidence says no, or unsafe	Some, such as kava, can cause liver disease, and some interact with medicines14

History is a reason to study a remedy, not proof that it works

If you value tradition, this history gives you real reasons for pride. People in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India, Greece, the Islamic world and the Americas watched plants closely and passed on what they learned. Modern drug discovery has leaned on that work.

Honoring it also means reading it the way Dioscorides asked: by checking. Old texts preserved useful remedies and mistaken ones side by side, and they can’t tell you which is which.

Today’s herbs also come with modern risks that ancient healers never faced. In the U.S., the FDA has no authority to check dietary supplements for safety and effectiveness before they go on sale¹⁴.

Supplements can interact with prescription drugs; St. John’s wort, for example, makes many medicines less effective¹⁴. Some products sold for weight loss, sexual improvement or bodybuilding have hidden prescription drugs¹⁴.

Liver injury is a documented risk. NCCIH reports a growing number of cases of sudden liver damage in people taking dietary supplements, and it warns that kava supplements can cause liver disease¹⁴. “Natural” doesn’t always mean safe¹⁴. Our article on what herbalism is gives the numbers.

Many supplements have never been tested in pregnant women, nursing mothers or children¹⁴. Talk with your clinician before using an herb if you are pregnant or nursing, if it’s for a child, or if you take prescription medicine¹⁴.

Five questions for any “used for 2,000 years” claim

1. Which text or community, and when? A named source beats “ancient wisdom.”
2. Is it the same plant? Names shifted across languages and centuries, which is why Arabic scholars wrote glossaries to match them⁸.
3. Same part, same preparation, same purpose? A modern capsule may differ from the tea or poultice of the tradition.
4. Has it been tested in people since? Long use earns a remedy a fair study. It doesn’t replace one.
5. Who held the knowledge, and are they credited? Respect includes naming the people who kept it alive.

Questions readers ask

The bottom line

People have written down plant remedies for more than 4,500 years, and the Iceman’s birch fungus hints at a far older habit. The record runs through the Ebers Papyrus, Dioscorides and Ibn Sina to the first U.S. Pharmacopeia. That long record pointed scientists to real medicines, and it was built by healers in many cultures who deserve credit by name.

History also includes stories that didn’t hold up and numbers repeated long after anyone checked them. Use the past the way its best scholars did: as a source of leads, tested carefully, with respect for the plants and for the people who first knew them.

Related reading

• Herbal supplements are a $13 billion business, and herbalists need no license
• Plants gave us Taxol and digoxin, yet the herb isn’t the drug
• An ancient recipe led to a Nobel prize, and new treaties ask who benefits
• From a $20 herbal patent to a $6.8 trillion wellness economy
• Humors, doshas and qi: what science kept from old healing philosophies

Sources

1. South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. “Equipment” (Ötzi the Iceman). Museo Archeologico dell’Alto Adige, accessed October 2026. iceman.it
2. Pearce JMS. “The Doctrine of Signatures.” Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities, Spring 2024. hekint.org
3. South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology. “35 Years of Ötzi the Iceman: September 19, 1991.” Press release, 2026. iceman.it
4. Hunt CO, Pomeroy E, Reynolds T, Tilby E, Barker G. “Shanidar et ses fleurs? Reflections on the palynology of the Neanderthal ‘Flower Burial’ hypothesis.” Journal of Archaeological Science 159:105822, 2023 (LJMU Research Online record). researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk
5. Pant A. “Charaka Samhita.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed October 2026. Britannica.com
6. Cragg GM, Newman DJ (Natural Products Branch, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research). “Natural products: a continuing source of novel drug leads.” Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 1830(6):3670–3695, 2013. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
7. North M. “Research Reborn: Dioscorides and Mattioli.” Circulating Now, National Library of Medicine, January 6, 2016. circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov
8. National Library of Medicine. “Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine: Pharmaceutics.” NLM History of Medicine Division, accessed October 2026. nlm.nih.gov
9. Library of Congress. “The Canon of Medicine” (Ibn Sina; catalog description). Library of Congress, accessed October 2026. loc.gov
10. North M. “Colonialism and the Plant Hunters.” Circulating Now, National Library of Medicine, March 22, 2016, updated December 2024. circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov
11. Vogel VJ. “American Indian Influence on the American Pharmacopeia.” ERIC document ED138390, February 24, 1976. eric.ed.gov
12. Upton R, et al. “A U.S. Pharmacopeia (USP) overview of Pan American botanicals used in dietary supplements and herbal medicines.” Frontiers in Pharmacology 15:1426210, 2024 (co-authors include USP expert committee members and staff of supplement and testing companies). pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
13. Tirumalai G, Long A. “United States Pharmacopeial Convention” (history; first published by the International Society for the History of Pharmacy, 2013). jcpp.net
14. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. “Using Dietary Supplements Wisely.” NIH, last updated January 2019, accessed October 2026. nccih.nih.gov
15. Tobyn G. “Culpeper’s herbal The English Physitian and its debt to apothecary John Parkinson.” Medical History 68(3):237–253, 2024. cambridge.org