History of Botany

The first steps in the history of botany would have been taken with the empirical plant lore passed from generation to generation in the oral traditions of our paleolithic hunter-gatherer ancestors. The written record of plants dates from the Neolithic Revolution as the domestication of plants and animals was established in settled agricultural communities around the world about 2,500 to 10,000 years ago. The first clear indication of a critical curiosity for plants themselves, rather than their uses, appears in the teachings of Aristotle s student Theophrastus at the Lyceum in ancient Athens in about 350 BC. In Europe this early glimpse of botanical science was soon enveloped by the Middle Ages and a preoccupation with medicinal plants that lasted more than 1000 years during which the medicinal works of classical antiquity were reproduced again and again in manuscripts and books called herbals while in China and the Arab world, the Greco-Roman work on medicinal plants was carefully preserved and extended but only as a medicinal record.