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120,000-year-old tumor discovered in Neanderthal remains
Neanderthal man / AP GRAPHICS
By MICHELLE CASTILLO / CBS NEWS/ June 6, 2013, 5:53 PM
Neanderthal man
/ AP GRAPHICS
A tumor found in a Neanderthal specimen more than 120,000 years old may give scientists insight into the origins of cancer.
The rib tumor, which was an abnormal bone growth known as a fibrous dysplasia, is consistent with a kind of cancer that is found in modern-day people. It is one of the most common bone tumors in humans, the researchers noted.
"Evidence for cancer is extremely rare in the human fossil record. This case shows that Neanderthals, living in an unpolluted environment, were susceptible to the same kind of cancer as living humans," co-author David Frayer, a professor of biological anthropology at the University of Kansas, said in a press release.
The part was one of 876 fragments found in a rock shelter in Krapina, Croatia, in the late 1800s, and is thought to belong to one of a dozen individuals. Scientists have speculated that the bones were so fragmented either because the Neanderthals were cannibals or they were eaten by carnivorous animals, the Smithsonian reported.
The tumor was found by completing an X-ray and CT scan on a rib bone. The images showed a upward-protruding lesion on the rib that could not be an injury because there was no other traumas visible on the back of the rib.
Because the growth was found in an incomplete specimen, scientists will not be able to speculate about how the tumor affected the health of the Neanderthal.
The tumor was surprising because Neanderthals are estimated to have had half the lifespan of modern humans in developed countries, meaning this individual developed his issues earlier in life.
"Most cancers affect people when they get older, and most Neanderthals and earlier populations died before they got old. So this was really exciting to see," Frayer explained to National Geographic.
In addition, Neanderthals lived in completely different environmental factors so known carcinogens may not have been present.
"They didn't have pesticides, but they probably were sleeping in caves with burning fires," Frayer explained. "They were probably inhaling a lot of smoke from the caves. So the air was not completely free of pollutants -- but certainly, these Neanderthals weren't smoking cigarettes."
Before finding this tumor, the oldest evidence of cancer was between 1,000 to 4,000 years old.
"Some people think that cancer is only a modern disease, but there's evidence from fossils, bones and mummies that it's actually many thousands of years old," Kat Arney, science information manager at Cancer Research U.K., told the BBC. "So this discovery isn't entirely surprising, even though such finds are very rare, but it helps to shed light on the complex history of cancer in humans and our ancient relatives."
Abnormal bone of the Neanderthal (above) compared with normal Neanderthal specimen (below)
A Neanderthal living 120,000 years ago had a cancer that is common today, according to a fossil study.
A fossilised Neanderthal rib found in a shallow cave at Krapina, Croatia, shows signs of a bone tumour.
The discovery is the oldest evidence yet of a tumour in the human fossil record, say US scientists.
The research, published in the journal PLOS One, gives clues to the complex history of cancer in humans.
Until now, the earliest known bone cancers have been identified in ancient Egyptian remains from about 1,000-4,000 years ago.
“Some people think that cancer is only a modern disease, but there's evidence from fossils, bones and mummies that it's actually many thousands of years old”
Dr Kat Arney
Cancer Research UK
"It's the oldest tumour found in the human fossil record," Dr David Frayer, the University of Kansas anthropologist who led the US team, told BBC News.
"It shows that living in a relatively unpolluted environment doesn't necessarily protect you against cancer, even if you were a Neanderthal living 120,000 years ago."
Complex history
The fossil was uncovered from an important archaeological site that has yielded almost 900 ancient human bones, along with stone tools.
The cancerous rib is an incomplete specimen, so the overall health impact of the tumour on the individual cannot be established.
The tumour was diagnosed by a medical radiologist from X-rays and CT scans.
Although efforts to extract ancient DNA from the Neanderthal fossil have proved unsuccessful, the researchers hope other fossils may shed light on cancer in prehistoric humans.
Commenting on the study, Kat Arney, science information manager at Cancer Research UK, said: "Some people think that cancer is only a modern disease, but there's evidence from fossils, bones and mummies that it's actually many thousands of years old.
"So this discovery isn't entirely surprising, even though such finds are very rare, but it helps to shed light on the complex history of cancer in humans and our ancient relatives."
World's oldest human tumor found in Neanderthal bone
By Stephanie Pappas
Published June 06, 2013
LiveScience
A Neanderthal rib fragment (top) reveals a gaping cavity where weblike spongey bone should be (see healthy rib, bottom). This cavity is evidence of the oldest known human tumor ever found, reported June 5, 2013 in the journal PLOS ONE. (L Mjeda (Zagreb)
The oldest human tumor ever found by more than 100,000 years has been discovered in the rib of a Neanderthal.
The bone, excavated more than 100 years ago in Croatia, has been hollowed out by a tumor still seen in humans today, known as fibrous dysplasia. These tumors are not cancerous (they don't spread to other tissues), but they replace the weblike inner structure of a bone with a soft, fibrous mass.
"They range all the way from being totally benign, where you wouldnt recognize them, to being extremely painful," said David Frayer, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas who reported the finding along with his colleagues yesterday in the journal PLOS ONE. "The size of this one, and the bulging of it, probably caused the individual pain." [Top 10 Mysteries of the First Humans]
Unusual bone
The Neanderthal rib fragment measures just more than an inch long. It was first unearthed between 1899 and 1905 in a cave known as the Krapina rock shelter in Croatia. This site held more than 900 Neanderthal bones dating back 120,000 to 130,000 years ago. Many of the bones display signs of trauma, and quite a few show post-mortem cutting marks, perhaps indicating cannibalism or some sort of ritual reburial.
Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were a human species closely related to modern humans (Homo sapiens). They died out approximately 30,000 years ago, though not without apparently interbreeding with Homo sapiens: Many modern-day humans carry Neanderthal DNA, suggesting the two species had sex.
In the 1980s, University of Pennsylvania researchers X-rayed the entire collection of bones found at Krapina, and they published a book in 1999 showing each radiograph. Most of those X-rays were quite high-quality, said Janet Monge, the keeper of physical anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, who participated in that project and the current study.
But there was one exception: One little rib fragment appeared "burned out" in the X-ray image, an overexposure that turned out to be due to the loss of inner bone in the specimen.
Now, the study researchers have returned to the rib, subjecting it to higher-quality X-rays and to microCT (computed tomography) scanning, which is similar to but higher-resolution than the types of scans doctors use to detect bone trauma in living patients.
Ancient tumor
The new images reveal a hollow shell, with an empty cavity where a network of inner "spongy bone"should be. (This spongy bone is so named because it's full of holes where blood vessels sneak through.)
"We do see it in human patients today,"Monge told LiveScience. "It's exactly the same kind of process and in the same place."
Fibrous dysplasia is caused by a spontaneous genetic mutation in the cells that produce bone, according to the Mayo Clinic. In some cases, the tumors are small and asymptomatic. In other cases, they cause pain and weakness. Because the researchers have only an isolated rib from this particular Neanderthal, they can't say whether his or her other bones would have been affected.
Previously, the oldest known tumors came from Egyptian mummies and dated back only 4,000 years or so. (A 1,600-year-old tumor containing teeth was found in the pelvis of an ancient Roman corpse.) That makes the Neanderthal tumor, at about 120,000 years old, the most ancient "by a lot!" Monge said.
In many ways, the Neanderthal tumor is a needle-in-a-haystack find, Frayer said.
"People of that time didn't live as long as they did today; plus, there weren't very many of them compared to the Egyptians and people today,"t he told LiveScience. "So finding evidence of tumors and evidence of cancers, is I don't know if I want to say lucky but there isn't a lot of evidence for it."
Anthropologists and archaeologists are always debating how similar Neanderthals were to Homo sapiens who lived in their era, sometimes alongside one another, Monge said. The new rib analysis reveals that, in at least one area, modern humans and Neanderthals had a lot in common.
"They lived their lives basically the same way we did and basically with the same problems that we have," Monge said.
The eyes have it: The Neanderthal skull (L) has larger eye sockets compared with a modern human skull (R). Consequently, the now extinct species used more of its brain to process visual information
A study of Neanderthal skulls suggests that they became extinct because they had larger eyes than our species.
As a result, more of their brains were devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in Europe, at the expense of high-level processing.
By contrast, the larger frontal brain regions of Homo sapiens led to the fashioning of warmer clothes and the development of larger social networks.
The study is published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Neanderthals are a closely related species of human that lived in Europe from around 250,000 years ago. They coexisted and interacted briefly with our species until they went extinct about 28,000 years ago, in part due to an ice age.
The research team explored the idea that the ancestor of Neanderthals left Africa and had to adapt to the longer, darker nights and murkier days of Europe. The result was that Neanderthals evolved larger eyes and a much larger visual processing area at the backs of their brains.
The humans that stayed in Africa, on the other hand, continued to enjoy bright and beautiful days and so had no need for such an adaption. Instead, these people, our ancestors, evolved their frontal lobes, associated with higher-level thinking, before they spread across the globe.
Eiluned Pearce of Oxford University decided to check this theory. She compared the skulls of 32 Homo sapiens and 13 Neanderthals.
Social networks
Ms Pearce found that Neanderthals had significantly larger eye sockets - by an average of 6mm from top to bottom.
“They were very, very smart, but not quite in the same league as Homo Sapiens. That difference might have been enough to tip the balance when things were beginning to get tough at the end of the last ice age”
Prof Robin Dunbar
Oxford University
Although this seems like a small amount, she said that it was enough for Neanderthals to use significantly more of their brains to process visual information.
"Since Neanderthals evolved at higher latitudes, more of the Neanderthal brain would have been dedicated to vision and body control, leaving less brain to deal with other functions like social networking," she told BBC News.
This is a view backed by Prof Chris Stringer, who was also involved in the research and is an expert in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.
"We infer that Neanderthals had a smaller cognitive part of the brain and this would have limited them, including their ability to form larger groups. If you live in a larger group, you need a larger brain in order to process all those extra relationships," he explained.
The Neanderthals' more visually-focused brain structure might also have affected their ability to innovate and to adapt to the ice age that was thought to have contributed to their demise.
Neanderthal wraps
There is archaeological evidence, for example, that the Homo sapiens that coexisted with Neanderthals had needles that they used to make tailored clothing. This would have kept them much warmer than the wraps thought to have been worn by Neanderthals.
Prof Stringer said that all these factors together might have given our species a crucial advantage that enabled us to survive.
"Even if you had a small percent better ability to react quickly, to rely on your neighbours to help you survive and to pass on information - all these things together gave the edge to Homo sapiens over Neanderthals, and that may have made a difference to survival."
Neanderthals were close evolutionary cousins of our own species, Homo sapiens
The finding runs counter to the idea that Neanderthals were not the stupid, brutish creatures portrayed in Hollywood films; they may well have been as intelligent as our species.
Oxford University's Prof Robin Dunbar, who supervised the study, said that the team wanted to avoid restoring the stereotypical image of Neanderthals.
"They were very, very smart, but not quite in the same league as Homo sapiens," he told BBC News.
"That difference might have been enough to tip the balance when things were beginning to get tough at the end of the last ice age," he said.
Up until now, researchers' knowledge of Neanderthals' brains has been based on casts of skulls. This has given an indication of brain size and structure, but has not given any real indication of how the Neanderthal brain functioned differently from ours. The latest study is an imaginative approach in trying to address this issue.
Previous research by Ms Pearce has shown that modern humans living at higher latitudes evolved bigger vision areas in the brain to cope with lower light levels. There is no suggestion though that their higher cognitive abilities suffered as a consequence.
Studies on primates have shown that eye size is proportional to the amount of brain space devoted to visual processing. So the researchers made the assumption that this would be true of Neanderthals.
