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Botany, Branch of Biology That Deals With The Study of Plants

Plants were essential to early humans for food, shelter, clothing, medicine and tools. Through photosynthesis, plants transform energy from the sun into chemical energy and produce oxygen, which has accumulated in the atmosphere over 3.5 billion years and is essential for many forms of life. While the process of photosynthesis was not fully understood until recently, early tribes and civilizations recognized the relationship between plants and the sun, as shown by their worship of both. The earliest humans, like other primates, depended totally on plants in their environment for resources until hunting methods were developed.

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53 views

Botany, Branch of Biology That Deals With The Study of Plants

Plants were essential to early humans for food, shelter, clothing, medicine and tools. Through photosynthesis, plants transform energy from the sun into chemical energy and produce oxygen, which has accumulated in the atmosphere over 3.5 billion years and is essential for many forms of life. While the process of photosynthesis was not fully understood until recently, early tribes and civilizations recognized the relationship between plants and the sun, as shown by their worship of both. The earliest humans, like other primates, depended totally on plants in their environment for resources until hunting methods were developed.

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LEXUS CCTV
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Botany, branch of biology that deals with the study of plants

Plants were of paramount importance to early humans, who depended upon them as sources of food,
shelter, clothing, medicine, ornament, tools, and magic. Today it is known that, in addition to their
practical and economic values, green plants are indispensable to all life on Earth: through the process of
photosynthesis, plants transform energy from the Sun into the chemical energy of food, which makes all
life possible. A second unique and important capacity of green plants is the formation and release of
oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesis. The oxygen of the atmosphere, so absolutely essential to
many forms of life, represents the accumulation of over 3,500,000,000 years of photosynthesis by green
plants and algae.

Although the many steps in the process of photosynthesis have become fully understood only in recent
years, even in prehistoric times humans somehow recognized intuitively that some important relation
existed between the Sun and plants. Such recognition is suggested by the fact that worship of the Sun
was often combined with the worship of plants by early tribes and civilizations.

Earliest humans, like the other anthropoid mammals (e.g., apes, monkeys), depended totally upon the
natural resources of the environment, which, until methods were developed for hunting, consisted
almost completely of plants. The behaviour of pre-Stone Age humans can be inferred by studying the
botany of aboriginal peoples in various parts of the world. Isolated tribal groups in South America,
Africa, and New Guinea, for example, have extensive knowledge about plants and distinguish hundreds
of kinds according to their utility, as edible, poisonous, or otherwise important in their culture. They
have developed sophisticated systems of nomenclature and classification, which approximate the
binomial system (i.e., generic and specific names) found in modern biology. The urge to recognize
different kinds of plants and to give them names thus seems to be as old as the human race.

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In time plants were not only collected but also grown by humans. This domestication resulted not only
in the development of agriculture but also in a greater stability of human populations that had
previously been nomadic. From the settling down of agricultural peoples in places where they could
depend upon adequate food supplies came the first villages and the earliest civilizations.

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