New Scientist
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It’s a Stone Age mystery: why did one-third of the people living in an ancient village far from the sea develop a condition typically seen today in avid surfers?
There is no obvious answer – but the weird prevalence of “surfer’s ear” in the ancient community might shed new light on the way humans lived just before the farming revolution.
Körtik Tepe, a site in eastern Turkey, was first occupied between 12,400 and 11,250 years ago. This was a time of massive social change, when roaming hunter-gatherers first began living in permanent villages.
We know very little about the lives of those early villagers, other than that they continued to hunt and gather food rather than farming the land. To find out more, a team led by Y?lmaz Erdal at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, examined 128 skeletons buried at the site.
Some 39 adults – 48 per cent of the adult population – had abnormal bony growths in at least one ear, and the condition was also seen in six of 16 children estimated to have died between their 6th and 12th birthdays. Read more on newscientist.com…
