科学美国人60秒 SSS 医疗保健让尼安德特人“超重”（在线收听）

Health Care Let Neandertals "Punch above Their Weight"

Health care isn't just a benefit of the modern human age. It goes way back. All the way, even, to the Neandertals."We imagine they would have been cleaning wounds, dressing wounds." Penny Spikins, a paleolithic archaeologist at the University of York in the U.K. "They may have used things like splints when you've got broken limbs. We know they had some forms of painkillers."

医疗保健不仅仅是现代人类时代的福利。它可以追溯到很久以前。一直到尼安德特人。“我们想他们会清洗伤口，包扎伤口。”佩妮·斯皮金斯是英国约克大学旧石器时代的考古学家“当你的四肢骨折时，他们可能会用夹板之类的东西。”我们知道他们有一些止痛药。

And they most likely needed them. Because remains of Neandertals show that most individuals seem to have suffered a serious injury at least once. The key detail being that those injuries didn't always kill them.

他们很可能需要它们。因为尼安德特人的遗骸显示，大多数人似乎至少受过一次严重的伤害。关键的细节是这些伤并不总是致命的。

Spikins and her team catalogued more than 30 cases of Neandertals who'd been injured but didn't die of their wounds, to investigate the pattern of health care in premodern humans. And they concluded that health care may have been key to their colonizing extreme environments, and pursuing dangerous prey, like mammoths and woolly rhinos.

斯皮金斯和她的团队对30多名尼安德特人受伤但没有死于伤口的病例进行了分类，目的是调查前现代人的医疗保健模式。他们得出的结论是，医疗保健可能是它们在极端环境中殖民的关键，也可能是它们追逐危险猎物的关键，比如猛犸象和长毛犀牛。

"Health care wasn't just something cultural for Neandertals. It also performed an ecological function. It allowed them to punch above their weight as a predator."Their conclusions are in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. [Penny Spikins et al., Living to fight another day: The ecological and evolutionary significance of Neanderthal healthcare]

“医疗保健不仅仅是穴居人的文化问题。它还具有生态功能。这让它们能够以超过自身体重的重量作为捕食者。他们的结论发表在《第四纪科学评论》杂志上。

And the results are one more reminder that Neandertals shared many of the qualities we think of as human. Except, of course, that they never made it out of the Pleistocene.

研究结果再次提醒我们，尼安德特人具有我们所认为的人类的许多特质。当然，除了他们从未从更新世中分离出来。