These days, nobody goes anywhere without an incredibly powerful supercomputer in their
pocket, ready at a moment's notice to dispense the sum total of all human knowledge.
But not so long ago, our ancestors were struggling to survive using rocks.
Think you could survive the Stone Age?
Well, think again.
It's incredible what modern medicine can do.
Heck, doctors can even perform full face transplants now.
But that's with the help of anaesthetic, very precise tools, and a lot of computers.
Mankind didn't have any of that in the Stone Age, or even really have the basic knowledge
of anatomy that came much later, but they were still performing surgery.
Archaeologists have the proof too, and it's as bad as you think.
Freiburg University archaeologists were working in France when they excavated a group of 7,000-year-old
graves.
Among the bodies was one belonging to a man who had been about 50 when he died, and he
had two holes in his skull.
The wounds were very deliberate and very clean, with none of the surrounding cracks and damage
expected from a violent injury or accident.
One of the holes was about 2 and a half inches, the other around 3 and a half.
Oh, it gets worse.
Archaeologists say that the wounds were very clearly made at two different times, and that
the man showed somewhere between six months and two years' worth of healing.
Flint tools, which are actually sharper than steel tools, were likely used.
According to CNN, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that early surgeons were even practicing
on cows sometime around 7300 BC.
Stone Age people weren't exactly foodies, but they still needed to eat.
And there's no question about the fact Stone Age people ate other people.
University of Valencia anthropologists discovered 10,000-year-old human bones in a cave on the
coast of Spain that showed very distinct markings indicating human meat was on the menu.
The evidence is striking, and includes human bones with bite marks.
If it helps, there was no sign of violence, so the people were probably already dead before
they were dinner.
They weren't the only ones, either.
According to The Guardian, archaeologists have been able to find that Stone Age people
moved to Britain about 14,700 years ago, and settled in Somerset.
And they had perfected the art of butchering to get the most amount of meat possible, and
they used the same techniques on the bones of men, women, and children that they did
on animals.
So at least everyone was treated equally.
The idea of human sacrifice is one that makes for some uncomfortable thoughts about just
what kind of people we are, and it's definitely nothing new.
In 2007, archaeologists released news via LiveScience of some disturbingly bizarre discoveries
made when excavating graves dating back to about 27,000 years ago.
One contained the remains of three young people, including one with congenital dysplasia, one
that was lying face-down, and another that was positioned to be reaching toward the hips
of another.
It was an odd burial, and they discovered other odd ones, too.
There were a handful of graves that contained multiple sets of remains, and many were remains
of young people or those who showed signs of severe deformities.
The fact that there were so many graves with multiple bodies suggests that human sacrifice
was definitely a thing, and the bodies were placed like that on purpose.
Why?
It's impossible to tell exactly what the circumstances were, or who the unfortunate people chosen
to be the sacrifices were.
Evidence of human sacrifice has been discovered in an eerie number of places.
LiveScience reports that human sacrifices were discovered buried in a 4,000-year-old
cemetery in China, and the practice continued into the Iron Age.
Hate going to the dentist?
Put it off as long as humanly possible?
It's a cakewalk now, at least compared to what it used to be.
It's entirely possible that death might have been a viable option instead of heading to
a Stone Age dentist.
According to discoveries made by the University of Bologna, dentistry was being practiced
at least around 13,000 years ago, and it was about as horrible as expected, with ancient
teeth showing signs that sharp stones were used to scrape out cavities and tissue.
The really strange thing is that the process Stone Age dentists used was very similar to
modern dentistry.
At least in Italy, cavities were cleaned out then sealed with a black tar called bitumen.
In 2012, archaeologists reported on a 6,500-year-old tooth discovered in Slovenia.
The poor unfortunate owner had cracked the tooth, and it was filled with beeswax.
Next time you start thinking about all the things you're thankful for, be sure and add
Novocaine to the list.
Science has come a long way in figuring out what's best for the human body.
It wasn't even that long ago smoking and drinking while pregnant were viewed as being OK!
So that same sort of medical knowledge in the Stone Age must have been very wrong, right?
It seems so.
In 2018, Washington University anthropologist Erik Trinkaus published a paper on the strangeness
that he saw in Stone Age remains.
Trinkaus picked 66 Stone Age skeletons from people who had lived between 10,000 and 100,000
years ago, and who had visible deformities.
Two-thirds of the diagnosed conditions were recorded as either rare or extremely rare.
So, what's going on here?
Trinkaus found that it wasn't just about poor nutrition or a lack of medical knowledge;
he found that many of the conditions were genetic, and that led him to the conclusion
that small, close-knit communities of people living far, far away from others led to a
fair amount of inbreeding - and that led to the high rates of severe deformities.
It's not all bad news, though.
In 2010, The New York Times picked up the story of Burial 9, a 4,000-year-old skeleton
discovered in Vietnam.
He had been paralyzed as a child by Klippel-Feil syndrome, lived at least a decade beyond that,
and was proof that even millennia ago, there were some people willing to be caretakers
for those who needed them the most.
You go, humanity!
For as long as people have been people, and maybe even before that, they've been trying
to kill other people who aren't them.
Anyone who thinks Stone Age man might have been more willing to work together for survival,
sorry.
Turns out, they were just as likely to kill each other as humans are today.
In 2016, the University of Cambridge published discoveries that pointed to good old fashioned
ancient group violence.
A group of skeletons, including men, women, and six children, were found near Lake Turkana
in Kenya, and they died about 10,000 years ago.
There was no question their end came from anything but a massacre, with the bodies showing
severe cranial fractures, broken hands and ribs, and stone projectile tips lodged in
the bones of some of the men.
Since they weren't buried, researchers suggest those people have a dubious honor: being the
victims of one of the earliest known instances of human conflict.
A similarly horrible scene was found in 2006.
This one was about 7,000 years old and located just outside Frankfurt, Germany.
According to The Guardian, the remains of 26 children and adults were found sporting
the usual signs of blunt force trauma associated with using rocks for weapons.
There was also posthumous damage done to the bodies and researchers suspect it was done
as a very clear message to others in the area.
Well maybe there was violence, but it couldn't have been that bad, right?
Wrong, says Dr. Rick Schulting from Queen's University, Belfast.
He looked at the remains of 250 people from Neolithic Britain, and estimated people had
a one in 20 chance of having their skull fractured.
He summed up his findings with:
"We generally think of Neolithic people as living peaceful lives - they were busy looking
after crops and rearing livestock.
But it was a much more violent society."
Most of those in their sample were wounded by clubs, flint arrowheads, and speartips,
and one woman even sustained injuries from a stone axe.
But it's tough to determine just how violent these societies were, because there's only
so much archaeologists can learn from bones.
Soft tissue injuries, for example, wouldn't leave evidence behind.
They do estimate the chance of dying from a violent death in even small societies might
be as high as 33 percent, and speculate some of the violence is probably domestic and some
might even be ritualized.
Theories that the Stone Age was pretty violent are also supported by 7,000-year-old skeletons
uncovered in Denmark, belonging to people who had been killed by arrows to the throat
and blows to the skull, probably thanks to other people, and not Uruk-hai.
Anyone born today is a Homo sapien.
People born in the Stone Age might have been something else, though, and if that was the
case, well, they were pretty much doomed.
Take Homo erectus.
They were around in the beginning of the Stone Age, but disappeared.
Archaeologists have long wondered why, and according to researchers from The Australian
National University, part of the reason was an inability to adapt to a changing climate,
while part of it was that they were just downright lazy.
Essentially, they just used what was around them instead of exploring, discovering new
places, and making new tools like the other branches of the family tree.
There's Neanderthals, too, a close relative of humanity that also figured out how to use
stone tools, create fire, made artwork, and lived in small family groups that allowed
them to care for the sick and elderly.
Advanced, yes, but they still went extinct for unknown reasons.
Even those fortunate enough to be born Homo sapien weren't guaranteed to survive.
For instance, the entirety of the Clovis culture, a group of hunter-gatherers who lived in North
America - were completely wiped out about 13,000 years ago.
Hate deciding what's for dinner?
Think it might be easier if there were fewer choices?
It may have been easy for Stone Age man to decide what was on the menu, but shopping
was a lot harder.
When Leeds Beckett University decided to look into just what kind of hunting methods prehistoric
hunters used, they found that one of the ways they brought down big prey was by picking
up a stone and throwing it.
Complicated?
No, but believe it or not, it was effective.
They started with a series of 55 ball-shaped stones recovered from archaeological sites.
They then turned to simulations, and found that for an expert stone-thrower, 81 percent
of the stones could have inflicted some massive damage at a distance of up to 80 feet away.
The spheres were perfect: not too heavy to throw well, but heavy enough to do damage.
In 2012, researchers from The University of Wisconsin found that early humans were working
together to hunt as much as two million years ago, selecting specific animals then targeting
them for the kill.
And humans preferred healthy adult animals, which are, of course, the hardest to kill.
Better get working on that throwing arm.
Here's the thing about kids: they're soft, squishy, and dumb.
It's not surprising that for a lot of human history, childhood was one of the most statistically
dangerous times of life.
According to UC Santa Barbara anthropology professor Michael Gurven, if a late Stone
Age person made it through childhood, they had a decent enough chance of seeing their
50th birthday and beyond.
But earlier, it was very different.
The majority of people died before they hit 30, and the switch came with advancements
in tool-making and technology.
According to Scientific American, it was only about 30,000 years ago people lived long enough
to meet their grandkids, which was a huge deal.
With the emergence of a grandparent generation, it's thought it not only afforded early humans
the chance to pass down potentially life-saving information by word of mouth, it also shifted
some of the responsibilities onto a whole extra group of people, allowing younger folks
the opportunity to do more than just eat, sleep, and die.
That kicked progress into high gear, but only at the end of the Stone Age.
Until then?
Yeah, you were probably going to die young.
Everyone's familiar with the idea of plague, especially the one that hit 14th century Europe
and did a serious number on the entire population.
That was bad, so just imagine when it hit 5,000 years earlier.
According to the Technical University of Denmark, there were several strains of plague active
at the end of the Stone Age and going into the Bronze Age.
Plague covered Europe and Asia in what they described as pandemic proportions, wiping
out entire civilizations.
And we're talking about a lot of people.
At the time, some settlements had as many as 20,000 residents living there.
Many died, cities were abandoned, and the few survivors fled, taking the plague with
them.
While they stress that exactly what happened is still a mystery, they do say it's likely
the plague led to a major collapse of Stone Age civilization, and given that the World
Health Organization says bubonic plague has up to a 60 percent mortality rate if untreated,
it killed a ton of people along the way.
Mankind has come a long way since the Stone Age, and it's easy to feel a little superior.
But there's a good chance modern man wouldn't do any better at surviving.
In 2014, Britain's Channel 5 aired a show that was designed to find out.
It was called 10,000 BC, and it took a group of 20 people and plopped them down in the
Stone Age.
It didn't go well.
History Extra talked to Klint Janulis, the survival expert on the show, which he stressed
was meant to be more about the social and anthropological aspects than the survival
side of things.
Because of that, they made some allowances from the beginning, because modern people
just wouldn't be able to adapt without a leg up.
Aside from the fact it's impossible to know exactly what Stone Age clothing looked like,
participants also needed to be given shoes.
While our ancient ancestors would have gone barefoot, modern people just don't have the
tough feet that would have allowed for that.
They also couldn't make containers like the ones actual Stone Age people would have made
and used, so they were given more modern ceramics.
There were also a ton of surprises, like their attempts at using reindeer hides for blankets.
Those quickly became infested with maggots, so yeah, if any mad scientist ever shows up
in a time machine and gives you the chance to go back and live a simpler life in the
Stone Age?
Maybe don't take them up on it.
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