How healthy were the Krapina hominids?

On 23 August 1899, palaeontologist Dragutin Gorjanovic- Kramberger, alerted by a local schoolteacher, visited a cave in Krapina, Croatia. There he found a chipped stone tool, some animal bones and a single human molar. Over the next six years, he and colleagues found a huge collection of fossilised remains of early hominids. Known as Neanderthals, they probably became extinct about 30,000 years ago, but the Krapina cave remains are dated to some 100,000 years before that.

In 1999, two American researchers, Alan Mann and Janet Monge, studied X-rays of 884 of the bones. They expected to find evidence of disease or injury, but in fact found that most of these individuals were healthy. There were a few exceptions though. Mann and Monge discovered signs of a bone tumour in one of the Neanderthals and they thought that one may have had a hand surgically amputated; in others they found evidence of osteoarthritis.

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Fossil skull and bones of Neanderthal man with osteoarthritis
(John Reader/Science Photo Library)

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