Neanderthals Suffered a Lot of Traumatic Injuries. So How Did They Live So Long?
David
Robson
3
hrs ago
©
Vasily Fedosenko / Reuters
A chamomile plantation VASILY
FEDOSENKO / REUTERS
Neanderthals
suffered many gruesome injuries in their day. The precious remains
of our ancient-human relatives reveal crushed limbs, fractured
skulls, and broken ribs — relics from hunting accidents and
warfare. That’s not to mention severe tooth abscesses and broken
teeth that would have contributed to severe chronic pain.
Behind
these gory details, however, lies the fact that many of these
individuals appear to have survived for months or even years after
their injuries. They lived to fight another day. This is at odds
with some common assumptions about Neanderthals: Compared to modern
humans, they are often thought to have lacked the necessary
compassion or cognitive abilities to look after the sick. “We can
infer from the fact that they survived that they must have been
helped by others—and in some cases that help must have been
knowledgeable and quite well planned,” says Penny
Spikins,
an archaeologist at the University of York in the United Kingdom.
Their survival would have only been possible, in other words, if
they had sophisticated health care.
In
a recent
paper
in Quaternary
Science Reviews,
Spikins concludes that Neanderthals’ medical skills were
remarkably similar to our own ancestors’ methods, and included
wound dressing, fever management, midwifery, and a budding
pharmacopeia of herbal remedies. Developing these abilities, she
hypothesizes, might have even changed the course of their
evolution.
Spikins
has previously researched the motives
of Neanderthal health care. In an attempt to debunk
the myth that Neanderthals lacked the compassion of modern Homo
sapiens,
for instance, she describes one individual found in Shanidar Cave
in Iraq who survived for a decade or more despite a withered arm
and head injuries that would have probably resulted in sight and
hearing loss. His survival would almost certainly have been
impossible unless other group members had not provided him with
food, water, and shelter—a level of altruism not typically
associated with the Neanderthal mind, Spikins says. She has now
charted many other examples of individuals who could not have lived
through their illnesses without the help of others.
Her
latest paper builds on this analysis by examining some of the
specific medical skills involved in such a level of care. In the
vast array of bones that archaeologists have uncovered, the
fractures often had healed without significant deformities,
suggesting that they had been set with a primitive splint. Many of
these wounds, such as the severe head traumas and broken ribs,
would have probably resulted in significant blood loss and
increased risk of infection, yet the injured individuals survived
long enough for the bones to heal, and their remains lack signs of
severe infection—which, Spikins says, would be apparent in lumps
and bumps on the bone edges.
All
of this suggests that Neanderthals had some means of dressing
wounds. Spikins doesn’t know exactly what those methods were, but
she points out that bandages can be made from animal parts. Some
Inuit groups today, for instance, use lemming skins to dress wounds
and boils, since it is
said to be particularly good at adhering to human flesh.
It’s feasible that Neanderthals would have also come across
similar methods to stem the blood flow and to keep the wound
(relatively) hygienic, Spikins says.
Neanderthals
may have even been in command of some natural drugs to speed their
recovery. One of the other individuals in the Shanidar Cave was
found to be buried
with numerous plants
that are believed to have medicinal properties, including yarrow, a
natural
antibacterial
and anti-inflammatory
agent
that appears
to accelerate wound healing.
As a common folk cure, it is also said to reduce
fevers and alleviate the symptoms of viral infections such as
influenza,
and to reduce flatulence and stomach cramps. Perhaps this was a
sign of the health care he had received during his lifetime.
Supporting
this hypothesis, Karen
Hardy,
of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and
the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has spent the past six
years analyzing
the calcified plaque left
on Neanderthal teeth,
which can carry tiny traces of the foods they ate. In the first of
these experiments, Hardy found the chemical signatures of yarrow
and chamomile, which is also thought to be an anti-inflammatory
agent. Since these plants taste extremely bitter, and have little
nutritional value by themselves, she hypothesizes that they were
instead used for self-medication.
One
of Hardy’s later
plaque
analyses
of another Neanderthal individual revealed traces of poplar, which
contains the natural painkiller salicylic acid, and the mold
penicillium, the source of one of our most successful antibiotics.
While we can’t be sure that Neanderthals deliberately
ingested these substances for medicinal purposes, it’s telling
that that this individual suffered from a severe tooth abscess.
Within the plaque, Hardy also found traces of microsporidia
parasites, which cause acute diarrhea in humans. “The best guess
is that it had to do with one or both of these infections,” she
told me.
At
least one form of Neanderthal health care seems more certain:
midwifery. Skeletal remains demonstrate that, like anatomically
modern humans, the size and shape of a Neanderthal baby’s head
and the mother’s pelvis would have made unassisted childbirth
dangerous. “The only way those heads could have got out of the
birth canal is with that characteristic ‘twist’ which happens
with modern humans at birth,” says Spikins—a maneuver that
presents a high risk without assistance. From this, we can be
fairly certain that they had developed some kind of midwifery to
reduce the mortality rates, she says.
These
findings don’t just sketch out a new branch to the history of
medicine, showing that Neanderthal health care was remarkably
similar to our own ancestors’ strategies; the research might also
help us to better understand Neanderthals’ long-term adaptations
to their environment. Many Neanderthals lived in colder and more
arid regions across Western and Central Europe and some parts of
Asia, where they ventured as far north as the Altai Mountains in
Siberia. In the more northern areas, the main food source would
have been hulking great creatures such as mammoths and woolly
rhinos, the hides of which were so thick that they could only be
hunted with spears at a dangerously close range. In southern
regions such as modern-day Spain, meanwhile, Neanderthals appear to
have chased ibex over mountainous terrains, which came with a
serious risk of falls. That’s not to mention the many
predators—including hyenas and saber-toothed cats—in these
regions—that posed their own dangers.
As
a result of these challenges, injury rates were extraordinarily
high, with one
estimate
suggesting that between 79 and 94 percent of Neanderthals sustained
at least one traumatic injury in their lifetime. Spikins believes
it simply would not have been possible for them to have adapted and
spread so widely in these areas if they had not found the means to
treat serious injuries. “As primates, we’re not naturally
adapted to hunting large animals,” she explains of Neanderthals
and Homo
sapiens alike.
“But health care allowed groups to sustain much higher rates of
injury than they would otherwise be able to sustain, so they move
into an ecological niche that they weren’t really well-suited
for.”
Spikins
hypothesizes that—as with modern humans—Neanderthal health care
could have also allowed greater cultural complexity to flourish, by
enabling the older generation to share their knowledge with younger
members of the group. “The whole population structure changes
with health care, so you have more members who are older,” she
says; that cumulative knowledge might have allowed them to develop
more sophisticated ways of hunting, for instance. She would also be
interested to investigate whether midwifery allowed for the
continued evolution of the brain. “We’d really hope that this
study could prompt further thoughts about the ways these cultural
practices can impact on our biological evolution,” she says.
Other
archaeologists that I spoke to were intrigued by Spikins’s paper,
although they caution that we shouldn’t yet draw firm conclusions
from the available evidence, which is still somewhat
circumstantial. We can only infer so much from the way their bones
healed, rather than material artifacts demonstrating the specific
practices involved, and it is impossible to know for certain why
those Neanderthals were ingesting those bitter-tasting plants.
“There
is little hard
evidence—most of it is presumed,” says April
Nowell,
of the University of Victoria in Canada. She points out that many
other animals have been known to self-medicate to a limited
degree—and so it makes perfect sense that Neanderthals would be
“equally if not more knowledgeable” of the medicinal benefits
of plants. But she would have preferred more direct comparisons
with anatomically modern humans and other primates to see whether
the health-care adaptations differed between groups. It would have
also been interesting to see whether the specific injuries, and the
potential treatments, depended on the location and the particular
challenges that it presented, and whether they changed over time.
Did the Neanderthals in the north suffer from different maladies
compared to those in Southern Europe?
In
principle, however, the existence of more sophisticated health care
chimes with the burgeoning
recognition of Neanderthal intelligence.
“It is totally in line with Neanderthal cognitive abilities,
which there is no reason to suspect were very different from our
own, and which would have allowed them to survive in their
challenging environment,” says Francis
Wenban-Smith,
of the University of Southampton. It is one more reason, he says,
to recognize our cousins’ “capabilities as members of the human
family, rather than presuming them to be the simple-minded brutes
of popular folklore.”
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