Aren’t we faced with the same fundamental mystery of human insight? Where does it come from?

Trial and error?

Bingo. We only know which mushrooms that are tasty or give us a fun time because a lot of people died finding out.

There's also cheating : isn't coffee bean edibility observed from goats? essentially outsourced trial and error is a thing too.

Which is exactly what we do with lab mice.

Not only that. A lot of mushrooms can be eaten in small doses but will cause things like stomach upset well before death. I'd bet we as a species would quickly test mushrooms this way without dieing.

At some period in our evolution, it gave us pre-dispositions to certain tastes. Like our fondness for sweet & salty is universal.

We have systematized these pursuits. Even before modern science, language could be used to crudely pool together individual trial and error as a huge force multiplier.

I’ve often wondered how the heck did people invent soap? What made them think mix ashes and fat together and use the result to make stuff cleaner? (And that’s ignoring the fact that at a molecular level, soap is pretty amazing in and of itself.)

roasting meat, fat dripping in the ashes. At some point someone wondered the next day "hm, that's funny"

Some tribes have a drug with sophisticated preparation steps from multiple plants and they claim the plants spoke to them about their ability. Carrots were pencil thin woody roots, almonds were fatal, bananas were half rock hard seeds, rice was just another grass, wolves were skittish and bare their teeth at humans. How did ancient humans see potential in them?

I would imagine that a lot of wild plants that we regard as not particularly edible can look much more enticing when that's basically your only choice of food.

As far as wolves, it's still an open question as to how much they "self-domesticated" before humans noticed and started working from the other end. Seeing how human encampments would produce delicious food scraps in refuse (and still do, just ask any black bear!), it stands to reason that some animals would try to cash in on that opportunity. Then you have a selection process whereby the ones that are too skittish would not even bother, and the ones that are too aggressive would be chased away or worse.

The book "Guns Germs and Steel" has some good answers to that question.

More than likely the plant has a noticeable topical anesthetic effect - Orangutans don't have an explicit mechanism for passing abstract knowledge so the phenomena has to be explained subjectively. It might be a particular cooling effect, or something recognizable about the plant that it contrasted against an injury for which it didn't use the plant. Or it observed another ape that did have such a subjective effect and comparison - the Einstein of orangutans might have figured it out generations ago and they've been imitating a successful behavior since then.

The plant has been studied and analyzed, with various papers out there, like this one, but there doesn't seem to be anything recognized as effective for people (yet, more studies are probably needed) :

https://www.phcogj.com/sites/default/files/PharmacognJ-13-1-...

In previous studies, it was found that the Akar Kuning (Arcangelisia flava Merr) contains chemical compounds, including saponins, flavonoids and tannins, besides that the roots also contain glycosides and alkaloids, especially the isokuinolin group, namely berberine, jatrorizin, and palmatin. There are also some minor alkaloids such as columbamine dehidrokoridalmin, homoaromolin and talifendin, and fibraleucin terpenes, and fibraurin has several activities such as antifungal, antiasma, antibacterial, anti-tumor, anti-malarial and anti- inflammatory.

Orangutans (probably) can't pass on "this will help you heal", but they might be able to pass on "Put this on a wound."

It was a prescription from Dr. Zaius

https://youtu.be/JlmzUEQxOvA

> Is he just repeating what he's seen humans do

This is most probably the main reason. However there is some debate on whether these learned behaviours can be passed across generations.

Here is David Attenborough showing Orangutans washing clothes/using soap/tools/etc. mimicking what they have seen Humans in their environment do - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFACrIx5SZ0

This is an animal living in the wild who did not have contact with humans. The article mentions that he may have learned it from other orangutans, but says nothing about humans.

Yeah, i read that but i don't think it tells the whole story. In Borneo they live in close quarters with Humans and often observe people (i.e. curiosity) from the forest's edge and may have picked up something via this way. They are very clever primates and hence could have picked up this behaviour in any number of ways.

PS: Also checkout the Orangutan Jungle School video i link here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244125