Lead poisoning has been a feature of our evolution
Our hominid ancestors faced a Pleistocene world full of dangers-and apparently one of those dangers was lead poisoning.
Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define modern" the way a paleoanthropologist might: a time that started a few thousand years ago with ancient Roman silver smelting and lead pipes. According to a recent study, however, lead is a much more ancient nemesis, one that predates not just the Romans but the existence of our genus Homo. Paleoanthropologist Renaud Joannes-Boyau of Australia's Southern Cross University and his colleagues found evidence of exposure to dangerous amounts of lead in the teeth of fossil apes and hominins dating back almost 2 million years. And somewhat controversially, they suggest that the toxic element's pervasiveness may have helped shape our evolutionary history.
The skull of an early hominid. Credit: Einsamer Schutze / Wikimedia The Romans didn't invent lead poisoningJoannes-Boyau and his colleagues took tiny samples of preserved enamel and dentin from the teeth of 51 fossils. In most of those teeth, the paleoanthropologists found evidence that these apes and hominins had been exposed to lead-sometimes in dangerous quantities-fairly often during their early years.