First skeletal evidence of HSS in Europe 43,000 to 39,000 BCE, page 1

Originally posted by Hanslune
reply to post by HappyBunny

Most interesting. I would wonder if a measles leaves signs of having infected a body - or does it kill the person to fast to imprint changes on the skeleton?

Measles can cause Paget's disease of bone--it can cause hip problems, bowed legs, overgrowth of bone in the skull...so yes, it can show up indirectly in the skeleton. They've also found measles virus RNA in bone tissue. I don't know if there's any evidence of that in Neandertal skeletons or if they've looked for it or what.

Now, there was a paper out not long ago saying that Neandertal genes boosted modern H. sapiens' immune systems; however, they're pretty sure that the Neandertals (and Denisovans) did NOT have the genes necessary to fend off diseases like measles, which they could only have gotten from us. With the population density so low, there was little risk for an epidemic and so they never evolved that response.

Also, and I should have mentioned it in my first post, but you wouldn't need a single Neandertal to die in order to reduce the birth rate. Measles can also cause sterility if acquired as an adult. The leading cause of sterility in adults is gonorrhea, and that might be another possible culprit--it is over 200,000 years old, and let's face it, humans will have sex as often as we can.

There has been some study of pathogens vs Neanderthals

Study

The Neanderthals were a Eurasian human species of the genus Homo that disappeared approximately 30,000 years ago. The cause or causes of their extinction continues to intrigue specialists and non-specialists alike. Here a contributory role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs) is suggested. TSEs could have infected Neanderthal groups as a result of general cannibalistic activity and brain tissue consumption in particular. Further infection could then have taken place through continued cannibalistic activity or via shared used of infected stone tools. A modern human hunter-gatherer proxy has been developed and applied as a hypothetical model to the Neanderthals. This hypothesis suggests that the impact of TSEs on the Neanderthals could have been dramatic and have played a large part in contributing to the processes of Neanderthal extinction.

That is very interesting--and even today there are outbreaks of TSE's and CJD from eating infected brains. (BSE or mad cow disease is related.) CJD is always fatal. Which brings up another point that we might not want to get into: infectious proteins or prions.

Thanks for the links, Hanslune. I'm checking them out.

edit on 11/9/2011 by HappyBunny because: (no reason given)