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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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?
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: What is the oldest evidence of medical care among early humans?
I think it was probably made out of jasper. So, you know, like a hard rock-like substance, right, that you could sharpen and kind of whittle down, right, to be a little bit of a drill that you would have massaged between your fingers and rotated back and forth to get it to drill down through that sort of enamel and release that pain, right?
Yeah.
The researchers also estimate it would have taken somewhere between like 30 and 40 minutes to drill these holes, right? And so it's not just a quick, you know, mechanical drill that's in your mouth. This is something where someone's probably holding you down and the other person is probably, you know, needling back and forth with this rock tool. in your tooth to release that pain and pressure.
So, you know, who knows if they were able to find some, you know, plants that helped with that pain resolution after it. I sure hope so.
I mean, I feel like we're giving people nightmares already in this segment when we talk about DIY medical, DIY dental drills. Yeah. I mean, Penny, what about, you know, Laura brought up Neanderthals. What do we see in Neanderthal medical care? Like what's in their doctor bag? It's actually a surprise.
I mean, I'm surprised by how much we see abolition, but I am quite surprised by what keeps coming up. 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.
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Chapter 4: What dental practices did Neanderthals employ?
It's really not true. And there's a real message there, I think, about, do you know what? We're quite vulnerable. We need other people. We're not naturally competitive. We're not naturally hard and tough. But together we can make things work. And you really see that with Neanderthals.
This was so fascinating. Professor Penny Spikens is an archaeologist at the University of York and Professor Laura Wyrick is a microbiologist at Penn State. Thank you both for joining me.
Thank you so much, Flora. That was fascinating. Thanks so much for having us. I really appreciate it.
This episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. And if we can help you excavate an answer to a science question in your life, please leave us a voicemail. 877-4SciFry is our number, 877-4SciFry. Look, we answer a lot of questions on the show, so please call us. We'll catch you next time. I'm Flora Lichtman.
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