Neanderthals lived in the nearby caves of Amud and Kebara between 50 and 60,000 years ago, using the same tools and hunting the same prey. But scientists studying the cutmarks on the remains of their prey have found that the two groups seem to have butchered their food in visibly different ways, which can’t be explained by the skill of the butchers or the resources or tools used at each site. These differences could represent distinct cultural food practices, such as drying meat before butchering it. 

When trying to understand the health of long-past populations, sometimes you have to rely on nothing but the bones. In anthropology, porous cranial lesions (PCLs) — areas of pitting on the roof of the eye socket (called cribra orbitalia) and on top of the skull (called cribra cranii) — have traditionally been considered tell-tale signs of poor childhood health in past populations, but have rarely been tested.

A new Simon Fraser University-led study reveals interbreeding between humans and their ancient cousins, Neanderthals, as the likely origin of a neurological condition estimated to impact up to one per cent of people today.

The study, published this week in the journal Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, was led by Kimberly Plomp, a recent postdoctoral fellow at SFU and Mark Collard, the Canada Research Chair in Human Evolutionary Studies and a professor in the Department of Archaeology. Their findings suggest that Chiari Malformation Type 1, a serious and sometimes fatal neurological condition, may be linked to Neanderthal genes that entered the human gene pool through interbreeding tens of thousands of years ago.