Neanderthals got by with a little help from their friends
Not brutes: skeletal analysis indicates our closest extinct relatives had a pronounced caring streak.
No one knows by what name the Neanderthal man now dubbed Shanidar 1 was called by his peers, but the chances are it wasn’t ‘Lucky’.
By the time he died he was missing a forearm, had a badly fractured face, severe injuries to his right leg, a crippling degenerative disease and growths in his skull.
But here’s the thing: none of this killed him. His remains, dug up in Iraq, show his injuries healed long before his death, about 40,000 years ago. He lived on until his 40s.
That makes him, in Late Pleistocene terms, an very old man – an achievement for any Neanderthal, particularly one missing a hand, who walked with a limp and had poor vision.
Now, analysis by anthropologists Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University in St Louis, and Sébastien Villotte, of the University of Bordeaux, suggests that Shanidar 1 was also deaf in at least one ear, with possibly damaged hearing in the other.
Neanderthals were huntergatherers, and lived in an environment in which they must have been prey for large carnivores, such as sabre-toothed tigers. On top of all his other physical handicaps, a severe sensory deprivation such as hearing loss should have made it impossible for him to survive in a kill-or-be-killed world, according to Trinkaus and Villotte.
That Shanidar 1 lived to a relatively great age, they conclude in a paper published in the journal PLOS One, is strong evidence that Neanderthals had strongly developed social behaviours that included supporting and protecting disabled members of their groups.
“The debilities of Shanidar 1, and especially his hearing loss, thereby reinforce the basic humanity of these much maligned archaic humans, the Neanderthals,” Trinkaus says.