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Earliest Porotic Hyperostosis on a 1.5-Million-Year-Old Hominin,Olduvai Gorge,Tanzania
Authors:Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo  Travis Rayne Pickering  Fernando Diez-Martín  Audax Mabulla  Charles Musiba  Gonzalo Trancho  Enrique Baquedano  Henry T Bunn  Doris Barboni  Manuel Santonja  David Uribelarrea  Gail M Ashley  María del Sol Martínez-ávila  Rebeca Barba  Agness Gidna  José Yravedra  Carmen Arriaza
Abstract:Meat-eating was an important factor affecting early hominin brain expansion, social organization and geographic movement. Stone tool butchery marks on ungulate fossils in several African archaeological assemblages demonstrate a significant level of carnivory by Pleistocene hominins, but the discovery at Olduvai Gorge of a child''s pathological cranial fragments indicates that some hominins probably experienced scarcity of animal foods during various stages of their life histories. The child''s parietal fragments, excavated from 1.5-million-year-old sediments, show porotic hyperostosis, a pathology associated with anemia. Nutritional deficiencies, including anemia, are most common at weaning, when children lose passive immunity received through their mothers'' milk. Our results suggest, alternatively, that (1) the developmentally disruptive potential of weaning reached far beyond sedentary Holocene food-producing societies and into the early Pleistocene, or that (2) a hominin mother''s meat-deficient diet negatively altered the nutritional content of her breast milk to the extent that her nursing child ultimately died from malnourishment. Either way, this discovery highlights that by at least 1.5 million years ago early human physiology was already adapted to a diet that included the regular consumption of meat.
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