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Ancient case of disease spillover discovered in Neanderthal man who got sick butchering raw meat - CNN
Nov 25, 2021 1 min, 21 secs
Martin Haeusler -- a specialist in internal medicine and head of the University of Zurich's Evolutionary Morphology and Adaptation Group at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine -- realized that not all the changes in the bones could be explained by the wear and tear of osteoarthritis.

"A comparison of the entire pattern of the pathological changes found in the La Chapelle-aux-Saints skeleton with many different diseases led us then to the diagnosis of brucellosis."

The study with those findings was published in the journal Scientific Reports last month.

Long-term problems resulting from the disease are variable but can include arthritis pain, back pain, inflammation of the testes -- which can lead to infertility -- and inflammation of the heart valves known as endocarditis, which Haeusler said was the most common cause of death from the disease.

The paper said the case was "the earliest secure evidence of this zoonotic disease in hominin evolution."

The disease has also been found in Bronze Age Homo sapiens skeletons, which date back to around 5,000 years ago.

Diet

Brucellosis is found in many wild animals today, and Haeusler said that the Neanderthal man likely caught the disease from butchering or cooking an animal that had been hunted as prey.

However, the paper said that the two large animals Neanderthals hunted, mammoths and woolly rhinoceros, were unlikely to be the disease reservoir -- at least based on the animals' living relatives, in which brucellosis has been largely undetected.

Given the man lived to what must have been a very old age for the period, Haeusler suspected that the Neanderthal may have had a milder version of the disease.

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