Apr 11
Romans loved a plant called silphium so much that they likely used it into extinction about 2,000 years ago. Many historians consider it history’s first recorded human-caused plant extinction.
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Romans loved a plant called silphium so much that they likely used it into extinction about 2,000 years ago. Many historians consider it history’s first recorded human-caused plant extinction.
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silphium fall 2026
SILPHIUM
Time Travel Question 52: Medievalish and Earlier
If you could travel through time, but only to see something for Research or for Fun, not to change anything, what would you pick? Yes, you may have a Babel Fish in your ear to translate.
Survey of Passenger Pigeon Behavior and Migration circa 1400.
Survey of Late Pleistocene Moa Species and Behavior in Aotearoa.
Survey of Haast's Eagle Behavior and Māori belief around them when they lived.
Foods using Silphium across time and cultures.
Survey of Cucuteni–Trypillia Culture and Disease across space and time.
Meet the bronze age teen buried in Kazakhstan with her bone dice when alive.
The first Spinner
The person invented weaving
The Homin who figured out how to use ochre
Early human dyeing tenchinques
The first garment ever sewn
The first woven garment ever made
These Questions are the result of suggestions a the previous iteration. This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct earlier time grouping. In some cases a culture lasted a really long time and I grouped them by whether it was likely the later or earlier grouping made the most sense with the information I had.
Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration. All cultures and time periods welcome.
We already did the burnings which lost their bracket, but the culture lasted a long time across a big area, and people keep suggesting it.
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Wild Silphium!
I originally was drawing reeds to go with @ironymobile ‘s character and got - really, really, carried away. This has got to be one of my more successful attempts at foliage, like ever. While I imagined some kind of connection between Irony’s Caladrius and the legendary lost herb, (perhaps they played a role in growing it) an attempt to write about it lead me down a different path entirely. (I may be posting that too, lol. But it didn’t go too well with this image.)
Silphium appears to have been a real plant, but had yellow flowers and a different stem structure than my own version. It was used by the Romans for various purposes from a cure-all medicine to a flavoring for food. This leads me to believe its effect on diseases may have been minimal, and then was exaggerated after what appears to have been its extinction. But who knows, could still be out there somewhere. It’s often assumed to be some kind of giant fennel, and I’ve had a recent obsession with fennel because of Spring and my desire to grow some of it.
Silphium perfoliatum / Cup Plant at the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University in Durham, NC
© Thomas Payne
There is exactly one account of Ferula drudeana on iNaturalist, but it's up for debate whether or not it's just Ferula communis lol