Twenty years of feeding records found wild Bornean orangutans repeatedly combining plants with documented medicinal properties more often than chance would predict — a pattern consistent with, but not yet proof of, great apes assembling multi-ingredient medicine

Twenty years of feeding records found wild Bornean orangutans repeatedly combining plants with documented medicinal properties more often than chance would predict — a pattern consistent with, but not yet proof of, great apes assembling multi-ingredient medicine

A Bornean orangutan can spend much of a day moving between food trees, selecting fruit, leaves, bark, pith, flowers or sap. If two plants with useful chemistry appear in that day’s diet, the combination could mean many things. Both may be abundant, both may grow along the same route, or the ape may simply like them. There is also a more provocative possibility: the plants could be serving a therapeutic function together. A 2026 study in Scientif…