Name: 教会我们人类的尼安德特人（The Neanderthals That Taught Us About Humanity）
Uploaded: 2021-05-03T10:06:35.000Z
Duration: 9 min 45 s
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基礎被動語態

In the late 1950s, high up in a mountain cave in Iraq, a skeleton was discovered that would

drive us to re-think what it means to be human.

The skeleton was not of a modern human, like us.

Instead, it was one of at least 9 sets of remains of Neandertals.

This particular specimen came to be known as Shanidar 1, and based on all of the evidence,

By the time he died, maybe in his 40s, he had sustained a serious blow to his skull

And his bones bore the signs of painful degenerative joint disease throughout his right lower leg,

possibly the result of a major injury to the right half of his body.

Now, the point here is not that Shanidar 1 had sustained so many injuries and coped with

Pathological conditions like his show up in ancient Homo sapiens pretty much as often

I mean: Life back in the Pleistocene Epoch, I don't know if you remember, but it was hard for everyone.

The important thing to note about Shanidar 1 is that all of his injuries had healed well

before he died, perhaps many years before.

For his remaining years, he probably couldn't have moved on his own very freely, or very

He likely had impaired vision and hearing.

He must've been cared for, by his own kind.

And at the time when Shanidar 1 was discovered, this was a pretty revolutionary idea.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Neandertals were thought to have been … primitive.

Unintelligent, hunched-over … cavemen, for lack of a better word.

But the discoveries made in that Iraqi cave provided some of the earliest clues that Neanderthals

actually behaved -- and likely thought and felt -- a lot like we do.

Now, it's usually very difficult to figure out how a hominin behaved, just based on its

But oddly enough, one of the major lines of evidence about what Neandertals were really

like has come from an unlikely source: skeletal pathology, the marks left on bones by illness

Lots of hominin remains that we find from the Pleistocene show evidence of things like

dental problems, healed breaks, and osteoarthritis.

These pathologies run the gamut from just annoying to downright life-threatening.

And over the nearly two centuries that we've been digging up Neandertals, we've realized

that there was no way some of these individuals could've survived without serious, hands-on

So, instead of being primitive cavemen, Neandertals like Shanidar-1 -- and many more like him

-- have taught us an enormous amount about ourselves.

Because it turns out, that big jumble of wonderful things that we love about ourselves -- the

humaneness, the compassion, and the kindness that we call “humanity” -- was probably

More than 40 years before Shanidar 1 was unearthed, another Neandertal specimen was discovered

that had a powerful impact on how we think about Neandertals, even today.

It was 1908 when the first nearly complete Neandertal skeleton was discovered in a small

cave in France near the town of La Chapelle-aux-Saints.

The bones were about 60,000 years old and belonged to an adult male who became known

And although he's called “Old,” estimates of his age vary a lot.

Some anthropologists think he was between 25 and 35, based on the condition of things

like his hip joints, but others think he was over 40 …

...which isn't very old by my standards, but it would've made him an old Neandertal.

His skeleton was described by French anthropologist Marcellin Boule in a detailed monograph published

He compared the Old Man's bones to those of the few other Neandertals known at the

time, and to the skeletons of modern humans and apes.

His meticulous descriptions were a big step forward for the field of paleoanthropology;

but his interpretation of the Old Man's anatomy would be hard to shake.

He reconstructed the Neandertal as a slouching creature with bent knees, unable to even stand

fully upright - the same kind of primitive caveman that Neandertals are still often thought

It wasn't until the 1950s that ideas about Neandertals really started to change.

The decades after the discovery of the Old Man had seen a boom in the excavation of earlier

hominins, like the australopithecines and Homo erectus.

And once they were welcomed into our family tree, well, the Neandertals stopped seeming

And it was while this rehabilitation of the Neandertals' image was going on that an

anthropologist named Ralph Solecki led a team into the Zagros Mountains of Iraq, to excavate

There they discovered the remains of at least seven adult Neandertals and two infants, dated

to three different occupation periods between 100,000 and just 45,000 years ago.

And one of the striking things about these skeletons was that at least five of them - all

of adult males - showed evidence of pathological conditions.

They ranged from relatively minor, like a fully healed scalp wound and osteoarthritis

in the hands, to the kinds of things that would land you or me in the emergency room.

For example, the individual known as Shanidar 3 - a male in his early 40s - probably broke,

or at least badly sprained, his right ankle at some point in his life.

And, while it did heal, he ended up with bony spurs and degenerative joint disease in that

ankle that probably caused him pain and limited his mobility.

Shanidar 3 also has a groove on the top edge of his left ninth rib - evidence of a wound

deep enough to have potentially collapsed his lung.

Based on the condition of the bone around the groove, it looks like he lived for at

least a few weeks, and maybe up to two months, after the injury.

And of course, once the scientists studied

Shanidar 1, they found that life for Neandertals could be even more taxing.

Like Shanidar 3, Shanidar 1 was an adult male between 35 and 50 years old.

But long before he died, he suffered a crushing fracture to the side of his left eye socket

which might've caused blindness or a brain injury.

He also had bony growths in his ear canals, which probably impacted his hearing.

Meanwhile, the bones of his right shoulder and upper arm were smaller than those of his

left, possibly because of a nerve injury and paralysis that happened early in his life.

And his right humerus had been broken and healed in two places, with the bone ending

This means that either his right forearm was amputated in an injury, or the humerus was

so badly broken that the two ends didn't heal back together, and the lower part of

Then there were the problems in his lower body.

He had a healed fracture in his right foot and a painful degenerative joint disease throughout

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教会我们人类的尼安德特人（The Neanderthals That Taught Us About Humanity）

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