A skull from Dmanisi in Georgia, roughly 1.77 million years old, has lost almost every tooth years before death. Somebody was preparing food he could eat. This is what skeletons can and cannot prove about that.
Orin is this channel’s recurring fictional character, used to picture the labour behind the evidence; the archaeology is real, he is a reconstruction.
Three cases, separated by almost two million years: the edentulous Dmanisi cranium D3444, the Neanderthal Shanidar 1 with a crushed eye socket, a missing forearm and advanced ear canal growths indicating hearing loss, and Man Bac Burial 9 from Neolithic Vietnam, roughly 4,000 years old, who lived about a decade with quadriplegia. We look at why the three are not evidence of the same thing, why Katherine Dettwyler’s 1991 critique of “compassion” readings still holds, and how the bioarchaeology of care method answers it by calculating a minimum floor of provided labour instead of inferring feelings.
00:00 Dmanisi skull and its missing teeth
01:36 Shanidar One’s accumulated injuries
02:55 Man Bac paralysed youth burial
04:12 Three cases compared as costs
06:06 Dettwyler’s objection to compassion
08:23 Expenditure the bones actually prove
#archaeology #neanderthal #paleopathology
Sources:
• Lordkipanidze et al. (2005) – Anthropology: The earliest toothless hominin skull – Nature
• Trinkaus and Villotte (2017) – External auditory exostoses and hearing loss in the Shanidar 1 Neandertal – PLOS ONE
• Tilley and Oxenham (2011) – Survival against the odds: Modeling the social implications of care provision to seriously disabled individuals – International Journal of Paleopathology
• Dettwyler (1991) – Can paleopathology provide evidence for “compassion”? – American Journal of Physical Anthropology
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