Abstract
The Late Pleistocene Shanidar 1 older adult male Neandertal is known for the crushing fracture of his left orbit with a probable reduction in vision, the loss of his right forearm and hand, and evidence of an abnormal gait, as well as probable diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis. He also exhibits advanced external auditory exostoses in his left auditory meatus and larger ones with complete bridging across the porus in the right meatus (both Grade 3). These growths indicate at least unilateral conductive hearing (CHL) loss, a serious sensory deprivation for a Pleistocene hunter-gatherer. This condition joins the meatal atresia of the Middle Pleistocene Atapuerca-SH Cr.4 in providing evidence of survival with conductive hearing loss (and hence serious sensory deprivation) among these Pleistocene humans. The presence of CHL in these fossils thereby reinforces the paleobiological and archeological evidence for supporting social matrices among these Pleistocene foraging peoples.
Highlights
Paleopathological assessments of Pleistocene human remains have increasingly identified a suite of substantial and/or systemic developmental and degenerative abnormalities among the remains, in addition to an abundance of minor traumatic and oral lesions [1,2,3,4,5]
The degree of development of the Shanidar 1 External auditory exostoses (EAE) is associated with conductive hearing loss (CHL) in extant humans [19,21,23,24,46,47,48,49]
Even though individuals vary in their rates of production of cerumen and responses to irritation of the auditory canal, large (Grade 3) EAE would make it extremely difficult for the normal irrigation of the ear canal to cleanse the cerumen and exogenous debris from the canal [14,47,51]
Summary
Paleopathological assessments of Pleistocene human remains have increasingly identified a suite of substantial and/or systemic developmental and degenerative abnormalities among the remains, in addition to an abundance of minor traumatic and oral lesions [1,2,3,4,5]. Several abnormalities have been identified which would have impaired the normal functioning of the individuals, especially in the context of mobile Pleistocene foraging populations [6,7,8,9,10] These alterations have suggested that the levels of social support present among recent humans (beyond the mother-child dyad) were present since the Early Pleistocene [6,9,10,11]. These inferences have implications for the levels of social integration and complexity among these nonmodern members of the genus Homo.
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