29/01/2026
“The plants you need will find you”
Christopher Hedley, 2013
A new paper has revealed a clear human fingerprint on medicinal plant diversity and reframes herbal medicine as an emergent, co-evolved system, rather than an accidental pharmacological curiosity.
The human fingerprint of medicinal plant species diversity argues that the global distribution of medicinal plant diversity is not simply a reflection of overall plant biodiversity or ecological richness, but is strongly shaped by long-term human cultural, medical and historical factors. The authors show that regions with high medicinal plant diversity often correspond to areas with deep, continuous traditions of human settlement, healing systems and ethnomedical knowledge, rather than just botanical “hotspots” alone.
Using global datasets, the paper demonstrates that medicinal floras are disproportionately enriched in certain plant lineages and regions, reflecting selective human use over millennia. In other words, humans have acted as powerful evolutionary and ecological filters: repeatedly identifying, cultivating, trading and conserving plants with perceived therapeutic value. This has created a distinctive “human fingerprint” on medicinal plant diversity that differs from patterns seen in non-medicinal plant species.
They write: “A key unexplored topic is whether variation in the duration of human interactions with a flora has influenced regional heterogeneity in medicinal plant knowledge and diversity. Here, we investigate and compare these influences on the distribution and diversity of 32,460 medicinal plant species and on global vascular plant distributions. We identify significant regional variation in medicinal plant diversity, including "hotspots" (India, Nepal, Myanmar, and China) and "coldspots" (the Andes, New Guinea, Madagascar, the Cape Provinces, and Western Australia) of diversity. Regions with long histories of human settlement typically boast richer medicinal floras than expected.”
The study also highlights that medicinal plant diversity is tightly linked to cultural diversity and traditional knowledge systems, and that erosion of indigenous and local knowledge threatens not just cultural heritage, but the functional diversity of medicinal floras themselves.
Overall, the paper reframes medicinal plants as a biocultural phenomenon—emerging from long co-evolution between humans and plants—rather than a random subset of the world’s flora. This has major implications for conservation, emphasising that protecting medicinal plant diversity requires safeguarding both ecosystems and the human knowledge systems that shape them.
Australia presents as an apparent anomaly in the analysis, showing a low recorded medicinal plant diversity signal despite one of the longest continuous human occupations on Earth. This pattern does not contradict human-plant co-development, but instead exposes limitations in how medicinal knowledge is captured in global datasets. Aboriginal medicinal systems were profoundly disrupted by colonisation, leaving extensive therapeutic knowledge undocumented or fragmented. In addition, Australian healing traditions emphasise holistic, ecological, and spiritual frameworks—a cultural sophistication poorly reflected in Western-style materia medica inventories. Rather than a true exception, Australia illustrates how low recorded medicinal plant diversity may arise from disrupted documentation and knowledge transmission, especially from an oral tradition, not from an absence of deep human-plant co-development.
The authors write: “By contrast, colonial influences and modernization may have contributed to geographically uneven erosion or non-documentation of this knowledge, highlighting the need to better preserve and explore traditional ethnobotanical practices. For instance, profound demographic collapse in Latin America and Australia from colonization likely led to significant losses in ethnobotanical knowledge, thereby weakening the continuity of medicinal practices. By comparison, Africa and much of Asia retained stronger cultural resilience, allowing traditional practices to persist more robustly and continue shaping medicinal plant diversity.” And they later conclude: “Regions we identified as medicinal plant diversity coldspots, such as the Andes, New Guinea, Madagascar, the Cape Provinces, and Western Australia, likely have unrecorded or unrecognized medicinal plant resources and therefore require knowledge revitalization.”
What this study shows overall is that medicinal plants are not chance. Over millennia, humans have acted as powerful selective forces—identifying, protecting, propagating and trading plants with meaningful bioactivity. In turn, these plants shaped medical traditions, therapeutic intuition and systems of care. Medicinal floras are therefore not random subsets of biodiversity, but biocultural archives.
This study makes it clear that herbal medicine is not a discarded relic of pre-scientific thinking, but a living knowledge system embedded in human psychology, culture and practice. The global patterns of medicinal plant diversity it reveals reflect enduring human selection, memory and meaning, not historical accident.
Herbal medicine persists because it aligns with how humans perceive illness, healing, and the natural world—shaped by a long co-evolution that is not superseded by modern biomedicine. Far from being obsolete, it remains relevant precisely because it is woven into the ecological, cognitive and cultural architecture of human health.
For more information see: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41151580/
