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,

he had lived a difficult life.

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

just above his left eye.

He had lost his right forearm.

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

so many ailments.

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

as they do in Neandertals.

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

far.

He likely had impaired vision and hearing.

So how did he live so long?

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

bones.

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

or injury.

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

help from members of their own groups.

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

not unique to us, at all.

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

as the Old Man of La Chapelle.

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

in 1911.

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

as today.

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

so strange and primitive.

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

a site called Shanidar Cave.

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

just above the elbow joint.

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

the arm was somehow removed later.

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

that foot, ankle, and knee, possibly caused by some serious trauma to the right half of

his body.

So, when you put all of the evidence together, it seems that Shanidar 1 may have been blind

in one eye and deaf in at least one ear.

He probably walked with a bad limp, which made getting around hard and likely painful.

And he had only his left hand, which limited his ability to perform lots of tasks.

It took decades for experts to find and describe all of the pathologies that Shanidar-1 suffered

from.

But from the very beginning, Solecki saw something striking among all of those injuries: In those

bones, he saw the very humanity of the Shanidar Neandertals.

Based on all the healed injuries on the skeletons, Solecki concluded that many of these Neandertals

would've needed extensive care and accommodation by their groups.

For example, in the short term, the broken bones of Shanidar 1 would've kept him immobile

for weeks, if not months.

So his group would've had to feed him and help him get around.

And over the longer term, the loss of his hand, his compromised senses, and the extensive

osteoarthritis in his right leg likely meant that he couldn't help with some of the tasks

that were important to the survival of the group, like hunting.

So instead, his group would've had to compensate for this in some way, like giving him things

to do that didn't require moving around and keeping him out of dangerous situations,

like encounters with predators.

He might've even slowed the group down - but they didn't leave him behind.

In 1971, Solecki published a book on the Shanidar

skeletons making the case that Neandertals were not dumb cavemen.

They must have been human-like in their capacity for compassion, in order for Shanidar 1 to

have survived well into adulthood.

And with this changing view of Neandertals, the time was ripe for scientists to reconsider

the Old Man of La Chapelle.

In 1985, anthropologist Erik Trinkaus published a paper that revisited Boule's original

description of the hominin.

He showed that Boule's reconstruction of the Old Man wasn't affected by the Old Man's

pathologies, as some had argued.

Instead, he said that Boule was just flat out wrong.

But, like Shanidar 1, the Old Man did turn out to have suffered from many ailments, and

those too provided even more important clues about what life was like for Neandertals in

the Pleistocene.

For one thing, the Old Man had lost maybe as many as 15 teeth well before he died.

He also had severe osteoarthritis in much of his neck and shoulders that likely were

painful and affected his ability to move his upper body.

His left hip socket was also severely affected by osteoarthritis and a chronic bone infection

that might've formed an abscess.

So, in recent years, experts have suggested that, like Shanidar 1, the Old Man must have

needed help from members of his group to survive.

To make up for his tooth loss, for example, he might've needed help with eating, like

preparing foods that he could chew.

The osteoarthritis in his upper back and shoulders limited his ability to hunt or carry loads.

And to accommodate his arthritic hip, his group might've had to move slower, move

around less, or help him get around.

And these would've been serious limitations for a group of hominins in the Pleistocene.

We know that Neandertals lived active, mobile lives that came with a lot of physical demands.

They successfully adapted to living in mountainous terrain and harsh climates.

And we know that life back then was hard for Homo sapiens too.

Adult mortality patterns and the frequency of pathological conditions are pretty much

the same across both groups.

But it's only been within the last decade or so that anthropologists have started to

really study care-giving among our hominin relatives.

And Shanidar 1 and the Old Man of La Chapelle are prime case studies; the very fact that

they survived as long as they did can be seen as evidence of the care that they received.

So, of course, we should still be proud of what we call our “humanity” -- our compassion,

our empathy, our ability to act in the interest of others rather than ourselves.

It's a key part of what makes us human.

But it seems that those qualities that we prize about ourselves have not always been

exclusive to us.

Even though we're the only humans left, we may not have invented what it means to

be human.

Ok now Kallie wanted me to remind you that

Another key trait of hominins is personal adornment!

So might I suggest our new Eons socks, or shirts, or enamel pins?

You can find them all at DFTBA.com.

Also big thanks to this month's Eontologists: Patrick Seifert, Jake Hart, Jon Davison Ng,

Sean Dennis, Hollis, and Steve!

To become an Eonite, pledge your support at patreon.com/eons!

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And as always, thank you for joining me in the Konstantin Haase Studio.

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