Paleolithic injury patterns: investigating different trauma frequencies in Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans
Final Report Abstract
This research project addressed the prevalence of cranial trauma in Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic anatomically modern humans in western Eurasia. It represents, to our knowledge, the largest systematic population-wide trauma study to date and involves important methodological improvements over previous trauma analyses concerned with fossil human remains. We compiled an exhaustive database of fossil cranial remains with and without skull injuries from a time period between 80,000 and 10,000 years ago, covering Europe, western Asia and the Near East, and elaborated a descriptive catalogue of single traumatic lesions. We used generalized linear mixed models to predict trauma prevalence of different samples of Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic modern humans. The approach enabled us to factor in variables, such as age-at-death, sex or preservation, and account for random factors such as variation in trauma prevalence between different skeletal elements at the same time. It thus represents a significant methodological improvement over calculating crude trauma frequencies, because a potential co-variation between trauma prevalence and several variables is accounted for. We could show that Neanderthals did not sustain cranial trauma more often than early Upper Paleolithic modern humans, and that cranial trauma remained similarly prevalent throughout the late Upper Paleolithic as well. These results contradict previous suggestions of exceptionally high rates of injuries in Neanderthals. We furthermore found that the probability to detect a trauma on human skeletal remains is significantly affected by the preservation status of the remains. We therefore caution against performing trauma analyses on incompletely preserved skeletal samples without accounting for preservation. We propose a quantification procedure as a powerful tool to overcome preservation bias in trauma analyses using fossil remains. We found ourselves confronted with a much greater amount of fossil human remains than we had expected in the beginning of the project. We therefore decided to focus on injuries of cranial remains instead of the whole skeleton, and to narrow the temporal range of the study to the later phases of Neanderthals. Moreover, the analysis of the data required a more sophisticated approach than initially assumed. The publication of the project's results in Nature (issue 563, 2018) received broad national and international attention in several newspapers, online magazines, blogs and radio broadcasts (e.g. Zeit online, Spiegel online; Associated Press, Science Magazine, Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, London Times, Le Figaro).
Publications
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Skull trauma probabilities in Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic modern humans. Poster presentation at the 7th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Human Evolution (ESHE), Leiden, Netherlands, 21.-23. September 2017. Abstract in: Proceedings of the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution 6 (2017), 20
Beier, J., Anthes, N., Wahl, J., Harvati, K.
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Skull trauma probabilities in Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic modern humans. Proceedings of the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution 6 (2017), 20
Beier, J., Anthes, N., Wahl, J., Harvati, K.
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Trauma in the Paleolithic: Comparing traumatic injuries among Neanderthals and Upper Paleolithic modern humans. 12th Meeting of the Society of Anthropology (GfA), Geislingen a.d. Steige, Germany, 18.-22. September 2017
Beier, J., Wahl, J., Harvati, K.
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Similar cranial trauma prevalence among Neanderthals and Upper Palaeolithic modern humans. Nature 563 (2018), 686-690
Beier J., Anthes N., Wahl J., Harvati K.
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Cranial trauma prevalence in Neanderthals and early Upper Paleolithic modern humans. American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 168/S68 (2019), 15
Beier, J., Anthes, N., Wahl, J., Harvati, K.
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Cranial trauma prevalence in Neanderthals and early Upper Paleolithic modern humans. Podium presentation at the 88th Annual Meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologist (AAPA), Cleveland, Ohio, USA, 27.-30. March 2019. Abstract in: American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Annual Meeting Issue 168/S68 (2019), 15
Beier, J., Anthes, N., Wahl, J., Harvati, K.
