Dr. Penny Spikins

Oh, that's a fantastic question.

Well, I think it depends how you define medical care, because actually we might not be the only species that have medical care if you're quite broad about your definition.

Because when we look at our sort of cousins, chimpanzees, our nearest living cousins, chimpanzees, with whom we share a common ancestor sort of seven to eight million years ago,

They have some practices that we might begin to call medical care.

That is like, you know, if they've got internal parasites, they can pick some really, really sort of spiky leaves to eat deliberately to kind of flush out those internal parasites.

And they can also use leaves to kind of as wound dressings, not just on themselves, but on other chimps.

So it may be that actually when you say how far back does it go, it's like, ooh, could be more than seven to eight million years, really.

Well, some of our best practices

early evidence comes from about 1.7, 1.8 million years ago.

And that's when we see, you know, a homo gaster in Kenya, KMNE, 1813, she'd had hypervitaminosis.

Now we don't quite know

how she got that, but she was really, you know, she was in a lot of pain, probably unconscious for various periods for several weeks, perhaps even months.

And she couldn't possibly have survived that long without others helping her.

So I think we can really take back some of those examples to at least one and a half million years ago, perhaps 2 million years ago,

which actually is really early when we think about our evolutionary past.

That's when we first start to say this is what we call human, you know, members of the genus Homo.

And it begins to make us think, doesn't it, that perhaps it's actually quite critical to how we evolved.

Perhaps caring for others wasn't just a side thing.

It might have been really important to perhaps even what made us successful if it goes back that early.

I mean, I'm surprised by how much we see abolition, but I am quite surprised by what keeps coming up.