Early humans kept getting their heads knocked in

Enlarge (credit: Sala et al. 2022)

Early humans suffered frequent head injuries but often lived long enough for those injuries to heal. That's the result of a study that analyzed twenty 350,000-year-old skulls from a cave in Spain. The study also found that recovery wasn't inevitable-several of the individuals in the cave apparently died from violent blows to the head.

Welcome to the Pit of Bones

About 350,000 years ago, deep in a cave network in what is now Northern Spain, the remains of at least 29 people somehow ended up at the bottom of a 13-meter-deep shaft. Paleoanthropologists have unearthed thousands of broken pieces of bone, which add up to the partial skeletons of at least 29 members of a hominin species called Homo heidelbergensis, which may have been a common ancestor of our species and Neanderthals.

The pit, called Sima de los Huesos, contains a mix of ages and genders. Paleoanthropologists are still debating whether the pit was a burial site or just a place where bones washed in with floodwaters.

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