How I Became Stupid

That's the title of a novel I just read (a satire, very funny, by the way) and I thought of it when I heard about the following article:  "Maternal ethnobotanical knowledge is associated with multiple measures of child health in the Bolivian Amazon" by T. W. McDade et al.  Researchers found that,  among the Tsimane' of the Bolivian Amazon, mothers who had good knowledge of the uses of local plants had healthier children than mothers lacking such knowledge.

I don't know about you, but I have very little such knowledge.  Of course, I live in a different environment; I know a lot about finding healthcare resources on the internet, for example.  But still: if healthcare becomes much more expensive, many of us may indeed be forced to seek out those special plants again!  I know that in my grandparents' generation, many people still had this knowledge, and they used it because they were too poor to afford doctors.  But if the delicate web that is the global economy were somehow to collapse, I would become not only poor, but also "stupid" in the context of my new circumstances. 

In the aftermath of the horrendous 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, an astonishing story of modern v. traditional knowledge came to light: while fishermen in the Bay of Bengal ran onto the newly exposed sea floor to scoop up stranded fish, every member of the indigenous Jarawa tribe fled into the jungle and survived the tsunami's landfall.  What did they know that the fishermen didn't know?  Why didn't the fishermen know what they knew?
I'm not exactly sure what the moral of these stories is.  But it wouldn't be a bad idea to call up your grandpa or great aunt Hortense for a little chat.