An Ode to the Anonymous Shitter

In the modern world, we do a pretty good job of writing down the name of each person who comes up with a new idea. Ideas belong to those who first had them, and those ideas are bound to that name forever. Einstein, Darwin, Franklin and Crick and the other one are all household names, but in the grand scheme of human history this is quite new. Most things were thought of or discovered before we started doing this, and so there's no way to know who first found out most things we know. This is something I innately know, but rarely think about. That is, however, until I read a snippet like the following one I found in an ethnobotany guide today:

I read this passage about an hour ago and all I've been able to think about since is the fact that some person hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of years ago ate Cascara bark and got the shits so bad it made history. We don't know their name, what tribe they came from, their age, or their gender. We barely know that they even ever were in the first place. Yet, though nearly faded, the footprint of their existence hangs imprinted on sands of time in the form of the deeply obscure fact that the bark of some random janky bush makes people poop real bad.