Field dispatch: update from Olduvai Gorge

University of Colorado-Denver fieldschool student Tracy Lancaster preparing to piece-plot materials in Unit L10.

I'm sitting here at the Sundown Restaurant in Karatu with my first real internet connection in about two weeks. The work at the gorge has been going very well; our excavations at DK have now exposed nearly four square meters of deposit, and faunal material is very common. Importantly, most of it appears to be very well preserved. Unfortunately, we have not come across any definitive stone tools as of yet, although a few pieces that were excavated yesterday may have been produced by hominins. I'll provide a more detailed summary of this year's field season next week when I get another stable internet connection...

View of our excavation trench in the DK area. The thick deposit at the top of the sequence is Tuff IB, which is dated to approximately 1.85 million years ago.

Neandertals suffered from cancer, too

A new article in PLoS ONE by Janet Monge and her colleagues reports the discovery of fibrous dysplasia on a 120,000-year-old Neandertal individual from Krapina. Fibrous dysplasia is a benign cancerous disorder that manifests as abnormal bone growth.

Krapina 120.71 in caudal view (a). The large lesion is located above the tubercular facet and extends laterally. The trabeculae have been destroyed and the cortex appears expansive. The thin cortical bone forming the superior surface of the cavern was broken away postmortem. (b) Krapina 120.6 shows the normal pattern of bony trabeculae in the medullary space. The surface irregularities are postmortem. Caption from Monge et al. (2013: Figure 1).

What's really interesting here is that these sorts of disorders are very rare in the archaeological record. The earliest examples were, until now, only about 1,000-4,000 years old. While it's difficult to determine what caused the tumor, it does demonstrate that these sorts of abnormalities are not found solely with modern pollutants that are often thought to be responsible for the high rates of cancers among contemporary populations.

References:

Monge, J, Kricun, M, Radovčić, J, Radovčić, D, Mann, A, Frayer, DW. Fibrous dysplasia in a 120,000+ year old Neandertal from Krapina, Croatia. PLoS ONE 8, e64539.