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Article Dans Une Revue PLoS ONE Année : 2012

Earliest Porotic Hyperostosis on a 1.5-Million-Year-Old Hominin, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania

Travis Rayne Pickering
  • Fonction : Auteur
Fernando Diez-Martin
  • Fonction : Auteur
Audax Mabulla
  • Fonction : Auteur
Charles Musiba
  • Fonction : Auteur
Gonzalo Trancho
  • Fonction : Auteur
Enrique Baquedano
  • Fonction : Auteur
Henry T. Bunn
  • Fonction : Auteur
Manuel Santonja
  • Fonction : Auteur
David Uribelarrea
  • Fonction : Auteur
Gail M. Ashley
  • Fonction : Auteur
Maria del Sol Martinez-Avila
  • Fonction : Auteur
Rebeca Barba
  • Fonction : Auteur
Agness Gidna
  • Fonction : Auteur
Jose Yravedra
  • Fonction : Auteur
Carmen Arriaza
  • Fonction : Auteur

Résumé

Meat-eating was an important factor affecting early hominin brain expansion, social organization and geographic movement. Stone tool butchery marks on ungulate fossils in several African archaeological assemblages demonstrate a significant level of carnivory by Pleistocene hominins, but the discovery at Olduvai Gorge of a child's pathological cranial fragments indicates that some hominins probably experienced scarcity of animal foods during various stages of their life histories. The child's parietal fragments, excavated from 1.5-million-year-old sediments, show porotic hyperostosis, a pathology associated with anemia. Nutritional deficiencies, including anemia, are most common at weaning, when children lose passive immunity received through their mothers' milk. Our results suggest, alternatively, that (1) the developmentally disruptive potential of weaning reached far beyond sedentary Holocene food-producing societies and into the early Pleistocene, or that (2) a hominin mother's meat-deficient diet negatively altered the nutritional content of her breast milk to the extent that her nursing child ultimately died from malnourishment. Either way, this discovery highlights that by at least 1.5 million years ago early human physiology was already adapted to a diet that included the regular consumption of meat.
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hal-00765231 , version 1 (04-10-2018)

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Manuel Dominguez-Rodrigo, Travis Rayne Pickering, Fernando Diez-Martin, Audax Mabulla, Charles Musiba, et al.. Earliest Porotic Hyperostosis on a 1.5-Million-Year-Old Hominin, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. PLoS ONE, 2012, 7 (10), pp.e46414. ⟨10.1371/journal.pone.0046414⟩. ⟨hal-00765231⟩
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