Similar cranial trauma prevalence among Neanderthals and Upper Palaeolithic modern humans
Similar cranial trauma prevalence among Neanderthals and Upper Palaeolithic modern humans
复制标题
DOI：
10.1038/s41586-018-0696-8
复制
发表时间：
2018-11-29
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Harvati, Katerina
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Beier, Judith;Anthes, Nils;Harvati, Katerina
尼安德特人通常被描绘成过着危险的生活，永远为生存而挣扎。这一观点在很大程度上依赖于已报告的创伤高发生率（1，2），并被不同程度地归因于暴力社会行为（3，4），高度移动的狩猎采集生活方式（2）或食肉动物的攻击（5）。所描述的尼安德特人主要是颅骨受伤的模式进一步被认为反映了与大型猎物哺乳动物的暴力遭遇，这是使用近距离狩猎武器造成的（1）。这些解释直接塑造了我们对尼安德特人生活方式，健康和狩猎能力的理解，但主要依赖于描述性的，基于案例的证据。创伤性损伤的定量、人群水平的研究很少。在这里，我们重新评估的假设较高的颅外伤流行率尼安德特人使用人口水平的方法，占保存偏见和其他上下文数据和详尽的化石数据库。我们发现，尼安德特人和旧石器时代早期解剖学上的现代人表现出相似的整体发生率的颅创伤，这是较高的男性在这两个类群，与现代人的后来的人口所显示的模式一致。除了这些相似之处，我们还观察到创伤患病率的物种特异性、年龄相关性变化，这表明两组患者在生命中受伤的时间存在差异，或者创伤幸存者的死亡风险存在差异。最后，我们的研究结果强调了保存偏差在创伤患病率研究中的重要性。
Neanderthals are commonly depicted as leading dangerous lives and permanently struggling for survival. This view largely relies on the high incidences of trauma that have been reported(1,2) and have variously been attributed to violent social behaviour(3,4), highly mobile hunter-gatherer lifestyles(2) or attacks by carnivores(5). The described Neanderthal pattern of predominantly cranial injuries is further thought to reflect violent encounters with large prey mammals, resulting from the use of close-range hunting weapons(1). These interpretations directly shape our understanding of Neanderthal lifestyles, health and hunting abilities, yet mainly rest on descriptive, case-based evidence. Quantitative, populationlevel studies of traumatic injuries are rare. Here we reassess the hypothesis of higher cranial trauma prevalence among Neanderthals using a population-level approach-accounting for preservation bias and other contextual data-and an exhaustive fossil database. We show that Neanderthals and early Upper Palaeolithic anatomically modern humans exhibit similar overall incidences of cranial trauma, which are higher for males in both taxa, consistent with patterns shown by later populations of modern humans. Beyond these similarities, we observed species-specific, age-related variation in trauma prevalence, suggesting that there were differences in the timing of injuries during life or that there was a differential mortality risk of trauma survivors in the two groups. Finally, our results highlight the importance of preservation bias in studies of trauma prevalence.