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posted by chromas on Tuesday November 06 2018, @08:48PM   Printer-friendly

Frequent inbreeding may have caused skeletal abnormalities in early humans

Early humans faced countless challenges as they fanned out of Africa: icy conditions, saber-tooth cats, and, according to a new study of ancient skeletons, an unusually high number of birth defects, both debilitating and relatively inconsequential. It's unclear why such abnormalities seem to be so common, but scientists say one strong possibility is rampant inbreeding among small hunter-gatherer groups.

"This paper represents a valuable compilation," says Vincenzo Formicola, an anthropologist at the University of Pisa in Italy who wasn't involved in the new work. "Many cases reported in the list were unknown to me and, I assume, to many people working in the field."

Many human fossils from the Pleistocene (roughly 2.5 million B.C.E. to 9700 B.C.E.) have unusual features. For example, femur bones with abnormal bowing have been found from China to the Czech Republic. The skull of a toddler found in the Qafzeh cave in Israel had a swollen braincase consistent with hydrocephalus, a condition in which fluid floods the skull. And a fossilized man in Liguria in Italy had a bowed right upper arm bone but a normal left one.

By and large, these were viewed as one-off curiosities. But Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, noticed a pattern: These skeletal deformations seemed to be suspiciously common in the fossil record.

An abundance of developmental anomalies and abnormalities in Pleistocene people (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1814989115) (DX)


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07 2018, @02:37AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 07 2018, @02:37AM (#758800)

    But they shure can play those fiddles.