“The fact that Tebo 1 apparently didn’t face serious infection suggests that
whoever performed the amputation understood how to keep the wound, the surgical
tools, and their hands clean and understood that they needed to do so (which
puts 31,000-year-old hunter-gatherers ahead of European and American surgeons
just a century ago).”
posted 10/12/2022 8:00pm ∞
“The findings suggest that some of the most important members of our
gastrointestinal menagerie—the ‘keystone taxa,’ as Candela and his colleagues
put it—have been with us even longer than modern humans have existed.”
posted 3/28/2021 8:35pm ∞
“Flint-knapping in bed is probably an even worse idea than eating crackers in
bed, but it’s a delightfully human thing to find traces of. Grains of red and
orange ocher also mingled with the bedding layers, and Wadley and her colleagues
say the grains had probably rubbed off from someone’s body art.”
posted 3/25/2021 9:48pm ∞
“Grotte de Cussac [is] the only site from this period where people buried their
dead deep in the interior of a cave (or in a bear nest), mingled the bones of
multiple people, or removed skulls from the dead.”
posted 3/25/2021 9:20pm ∞
“The children seem to have scooped up clay-rich mud from the floor and smeared
it on a stalagmite against the far wall, then drew curved, sinuous shapes in the
wet clay with their fingers. Today, visitors to the cave can see those fluted
finger-tracks, which clearly mark the heights of the three young children.”
posted 2/19/2020 8:43pm ∞