Dr. Penny Spikins

We know that there's that basis of desire to care for each other.

I mean, if we look at the whole spread of Neanderthals, kind of like 70, 80% at least of them have had an injury that's healed.

And so a lot of those are probably only healed because other people have looked after them.

I mean, our best example of that is Shanidar 1, but there are quite a lot of other examples, actually.

Shanidar 1 is this man who, when he was a late teenager, suffered a whole series of debilitating injuries.

So he ended up blind in his left eye, probably deaf, with one arm that was either sort of completely lost part of it or was amputated, and one withered leg.

So when we put that together, that's someone with quite high needs, even in our society, and lived for at least a decade and probably maybe 15 years.

And a lot of Neanderthals seem to have these patterns.

Lachapalosans had osteoarthritis in their lower spine, really quite severely, probably looked after for several months.

So there's this big pattern of

provisioning and care and looking after individuals that end up ill or injured.

But then we ask, okay, so as you're saying, what was their medical abilities?

So, you know, if we look at the El Cidron Neanderthals and we look at the dental calculus, you can see remains of things like yarrow and chamomile and they're kind of like calming agents.

There's even painkillers and antibiotics in one of the individuals.

So they're really very fine-tuned to their kind of how they can use herbs and plants in ways that we would see as quite medicinal.

We know for one thing, they must have had assisted childbirths because we know from the shape of the Neanderthal pelvic canal,

that babies were born having to twist as they come out the pelvic canal, like with us.

So they're very likely to have had assisted childbirth.

How they managed that, we don't know, but it seems quite likely.

Well, that's interesting, isn't it?