A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.
Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.”
A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.
Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.
— Ira Byock, The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life (x)
Fun fact! This is a Dmanisi skull from Georgia, another type of hominin to us.
Notice that jaw? When we lose our teeth, over time our jawbone heals the gaps, making it smooth, so when archaeologists discover skulls centuries later they can tell whether the tooth was lost after death (as the bone didn’t grow to cover the hole) or during the individual’s life.
The majority of this jaw has healed, so this person would have lived a number of years with basically no teeth. The age of this skull, according to wiki, is 1.8 million years.
This means that millions of years ago this person had a diet with soft, easy foods, and that others in the group would have known, understood, and helped by specialising their foraging for this one individual.
Or, in the words of my lecturer when we covered this, “Someone would have had to chew up this person’s food for them. Every day. Multiple times. For years.”
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