“Our findings suggest that language loss will be even more critical to the extinction of medicinal knowledge than biodiversity loss.”
– Researchers
Rodrigo Cámara-Leret and
Jordi Bascompte, examining the “high uniqueness in indigenous knowledge and strong coupling with threatened languages” in a recent
PNAS paper. “Each indigenous language is a unique reservoir of medicinal knowledge,” they write, ”a Rosetta stone for unravelling and conserving nature’s contributions to people.”