How did Neanderthals deal with illness and injuries?
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Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. If you try to look up where medicine originated or the earliest medical interventions, you'll probably find yourself reading about ancient Greece or Egypt or Mesopotamia. But what about before that, like way before that?
How did early humans treat disease and cope with injuries?
How did early humans treat disease or cope with injuries? What did a Neanderthal do if she broke a rib or needed a root canal? Was there prehistoric health care? Today, we're digging into those questions and what these medical interventions tell us about our ancient relatives and how the practice of medicine evolved. Here to field all things medical is Dr. Penny Spikens. She studies the origins of medicine and health care at York University in England. And if you're going to talk about ailments, you cannot sleep on teeth. So for our dental needs, we have Dr. Laura Wyrick, who studies ancient oral microbiomes at Penn State University. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for having us. Yeah, thank you.
Brilliant to be here. Penny, what's the oldest evidence of medical care?
Oh, that's a fantastic question. Well, I think it depends how you define medical care, because actually we might not be the only species that have medical care if you're quite broad about your definition. Because when we look at our sort of cousins, chimpanzees, our nearest living cousins, chimpanzees, with whom we share a common ancestor sort of seven to eight million years ago, They have some practices that we might begin to call medical care. That is like, you know, if they've got internal parasites, they can pick some really, really sort of spiky leaves to eat deliberately to kind of flush out those internal parasites. And they can also use leaves to kind of as wound dressings, not just on themselves, but on other chimps.
So it may be that actually when you say how far back does it go, it's like, ooh, could be more than seven to eight million years, really.
Well, as always, the question is more complicated than it seems, it sounds like. Well, let's talk about our human ancestors. What kind of practices do we see and when do they appear?
Well, some of our best practices early evidence comes from about 1.7, 1.8 million years ago. And that's when we see, you know, a homo gaster in Kenya, KMNE, 1813, she'd had hypervitaminosis. Now we don't quite know how she got that, but she was really, you know, she was in a lot of pain, probably unconscious for various periods for several weeks, perhaps even months. And she couldn't possibly have survived that long without others helping her. So I think we can really take back some of those examples to at least one and a half million years ago, perhaps 2 million years ago, which actually is really early when we think about our evolutionary past. That's when we first start to say this is what we call human, you know, members of the genus Homo.
And it begins to make us think, doesn't it, that perhaps it's actually quite critical to how we evolved. Perhaps caring for others wasn't just a side thing. It might have been really important to perhaps even what made us successful if it goes back that early.
Wow. Laura, what about dental care?
I think the teeth tell a very similar story as well. You know, I think a lot of our visions of ancient teeth are of everybody having cavities in every tooth, right? And having, you know, gangly, horrible teeth. And Neanderthals actually have beautiful teeth. Like I wish I had teeth as good as a Neanderthal for the most part. They have amazing oral health. And, you know, it tells you something about about the health of their diet. Right. And they're foraging and what they're going through and what they're what they're eating. That's amazing.
Yeah. They had their teeth were great because I think of teeth as such a liability.
Yeah, exactly. They they can be totally. But when you have great oral health, you know, there's something that really help you and benefit you. They're tools. They care around with your body. Our work really shows that Neanderthals had very different types of microorganisms in their mouths.
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