Kathryn Benjamin Golden, Phd on The Great Dismal Swamp

Like just the other day, I was I was in the forest near my house here in Ithaca.

And, you know, I have this app called Merlin, of course, for the birds.

But I also have this app called iNaturalist, which helps a person identify the type of flora and fauna they might see.

And there was this one certain plants.

They look, I don't know, it's something about, there's this thing that people say, like, if you

don't know if a plant is poisonous

or not, what some people used to do was they would take the plant and they rub it against their skin and see if their skin became inflamed.

But of course, with technology, I can just take a picture of the plant and see if it's edible or not.

So I took a picture of the plant and it was it was called Jump Seed.

And it's in the buckwheat family.

So when I and I said, let me taste this.

So, of course, I went home and washed it first.

But I tasted it.

I was like, oh, it don't taste too bad.

But it did have like some little hairy stuff on it that didn't quite agree with me.

But what I thought about was a maroon in the Great Dismal Swamp or Okefenokee or the Everglades or whatever.

They could have seen a piece of plant like that, and that could have been the fuel to sustain them to go a few more miles.

And the Great Dismal Swamp had that abundantly during that time period.

Right.

I mean, and they come into and encounter this swamp for the first times with already having knowledge, right, of some agricultural knowledge, right, some knowledge of plants that they may have already had.

But there is, to your point, oftentimes some experimentation that's going on.

I mean, we can definitely imagine that.

People are trial and error figuring out what is healthy, what is healthful, what is beneficial and what, what are the uses of every living thing, non-human plant living thing around them in this biodiverse ecosystem.

It is, it behooves them for the very stuff of their lives, right? For the very, for their futures to study and, to experiment, to research and figure out what are the offerings of this robust place.

And I'm certain that that took place in addition to what they already knew.