Dr. Diego Bohórquez

But they do, right?

And certainly that is just a level of sensory perception that I am not equipped with.

But I do think that there's quite a bit of that interaction in there to learn.

And then, of course, not only for food, but also for medicine, for textiles, and for many other functions.

These plants have been part of the ecosystem of how these people navigate their world, all the way from making a canoe...

to making a backpack to carry fish from the river into the house, right?

That's correct.

And here's where I think there is a large vacuum in biology.

If I will be with my biological, my

training in biology, if I would put my hat of the training in biology, I wouldn't be able to explain much of like, how is it that we figure it out?

Because even if you just go to a botanical garden here in the city,

it would be really hard to figure out what plant is for what, right?

Yeah, what's safe to eat, what's not.

Do you need to cook it or not?

Maybe like the cacti, you are able to figure that out by touch, right?

So from the biological perspective, I think that there is quite a bit in there to explore and to learn.

There is some very interesting work from the anthropological perspective.

So anthropologists and botanists that were studying the plants were exploring the jungles, not only the Amazon, but Borneo, Sri Lanka, and so on and so forth, and studying the interaction of native people with the plants.

And if going through the literature, that literature, there is a pattern that emerges and like the native people, they talk about how it is that they actually learn from the plants.

that the plants were the ones that will teach them.