Prehistoric 'Aspirin' Found in Sick Neanderthal's Teeth

[de officiis]

Prehistoric 'Aspirin' Found in Sick Neanderthal's Teeth

Hardened plaque harvested from Neanderthals is loaded with genetic material from plants and animals these prehistoric hominins ate, as well as remnants of microbes that reveal a surprising amount about how they lived and even what made them sick.

Researchers extracted the ancient DNA and bacteria from the jaws of three Neanderthal individuals from Belgium and Spain, and described the results in a paper published today in the journal Nature.

The Belgian individuals ate a heavily meat-based diet, indicated by DNA from wooly rhinoceros and wild sheep. Meanwhile, the Spanish Neanderthal seemed to have eaten mostly vegetable material, including moss, pine nuts, and mushrooms.

Perhaps more intriguing, though, were the microbial riches Weyrich’s team found preserved in the calcified plaques: The team recovered DNA from these prehistoric individuals’ microbiomes, communities of bacteria and fungi living on and inside their bodies.

“It gives us a picture of a wide variety of things they were exposed to in their daily lives, including diseases and the medicines they were using to treat them,” says study leader and University of Adelaide microbiologist Laura Weyrich.

For instance, the individual from El Sidrón, Spain, seems to have had some bacterial strains that gave him a hard time, and it’s possible the hominin turned to botanicals to treat them.

The Spanish Neanderthal was suffering from a dental abscess . . . . Poplar found in the sample likely provided salicylic acid—the active ingredient in aspirin—for pain relief. . . .

The individual was also dealing with diarrhea and vomiting caused by a different pathogen, Enterocytozoon bieneusi, and may even have turned to antibiotic-producing molds for treatment. Genetic material from Penicillium rubens was found on plant matter in this Neanderthal’s teeth.
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But it wasn’t until the advent of super high-powered microscopy and precision genetics tools that researchers were able to drill down into prehistoric plaques to really perceive what might be lurking there.
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What really grabbed Weyrich and her group in the new data was the fact that the meat-eaters’ overall microbiomes differed from the vegetarian’s, and that they differed altogether from the microbial mashups that live inside modern humans.

What the various groups were eating may be the key to these differences. And with this ancient reference point, scientists can now better track the way diet impacts the microbiome over time, and how those effects have shaped our evolution.
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The work could even offer fresh clues to why Neanderthals ultimately died out.

“The [Belgian] Neanderthals we looked at were some of the last that existed, so if there’s a signal in the changes in their microbiome that contributes to their health, then these are the ones we’d want to look in,” Weyrich says.

Our ancestors were smarter than I thought!

[doc_loliday]

It's hard to imagine what modern intelligence (or even Neanderthal intelligence) must have looked like in the prehistoric world. I hope we get a time machine in the afterlife.

But anyway, yeah, steak and painkillers; the bare necessities.