HENRY

A new Homo erectus find has shown that Tuberculosis is much older than originally thought. Previously, the earliest definite proof of TB’s existence dates to around 18,000 years in fossilised Buffalo, but this new skull shows small lesions that are characteristic of Tb and dates to around 500,000 years ago.  This suggests that TB has a long history of infecting not just humans, but other hominins too.

The paper, First Homo erectus from Turkey and implications for migrations into temperate Eurasia, is available in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and the abstract says -

Remains of fossil hominins from temperate regions of the Old World are rare across both time and space, but such specimens are necessary for understanding basic issues in human evolution including linkages between their adaptations and early migration patterns. We report here the remarkable circumstances surrounding the discovery of the first fossil hominin calvaria from Turkey. The specimen was found in the Denizli province of western Turkey and recovered from within a solid block of travertine stone as it was being sawed into tile-sized slabs for the commercial natural stone building market. The new specimen fills an important geographical and temporal gap and displays several anatomical features that are shared with other Middle Pleistocene hominins from both Africa and Asia attributed to Homo erectus.

It also preserves an unusual pathology on the endocranial surface of the frontal bone that is consistent with a diagnosis of Leptomeningitis tuberculosa (TB), and this evidence represents the most ancient example of this disease known for a fossil human. TB is exacerbated in dark-skinned peoples living in northern latitudes by a vitamin D deficiency because of reduced levels of ultraviolet radiation (UVR). Evidence for TB in the new specimen supports the thesis that reduced UVR was one of the many climatic variables presenting an adaptive challenge to ancient hominins during their migration into the temperate regions of Europe and Asia.

Posted on December 8th, 2007 by Simon Greenhill