Often dismissed as primitive brutes, Neanderthals could be altruistic and social, a study suggests. Analysis of the 50,000-year-old remains of a severely disabled one, named Shanidar 1, shows that he survived into old age thanks to the help of other Neanderthals.
Shanidar 1 was deaf, blind, missing his right arm from the elbow and had a severe limp. His remains were found at the Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1957 but a new analysis has just been published in the journal Plos One.
“More than his loss of a forearm, bad limp and other injuries, his deafness would have made him easy prey for the carnivores in his environment and dependent on other members of his social group for survival,” Erik Trinkaus, a