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Of all the possible ways the Neanderthals may have gone extinct, it turns out that it may have been as simple as a common childhood affliction that ultimately spelled their doom.

Illness is part of being human, no matter how much we don’t like it. It helps build up our immune systems and makes us grateful when we are healthy.

Unfortunately, there are some illnesses that some humans can’t overcome, but we have survived as a species because most of us at least overcome the common stuff.

Neanderthals, however, were not so fortunate.

An ear infection is a common childhood malady that is perfectly treatable today, either through antibiotics or surgery. But 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals did not have the benefit of modern medicine and health care professionals, nor did they have the anatomical features of modern human adults that make ear infections more unlikely to develop.

In a new study published by the American Association for Anatomy, a team of researchers found that the structure of Neanderthal ears made them more susceptible to ear infections as adults.

According to the study:

Neanderthals are among the best studied and yet most enigmatic fossil human groups with aspects of their anatomy and functional morphology remaining poorly understood. We present the first anatomical reconstruction of the Neanderthal cartilaginous Eustachian tube (CET), a vital component of the upper respiratory tract and nexus for the middle ear and postnasal airway. The Eustachian (auditory, pharyngotympanic) tube, comprised of a bony and cartilaginous (CET) portion, is integral to normal physiological functions such as middle ear aeration and pressure equilibration. Findings indicate that Neanderthal tubal morphology may have predisposed them to high rates of middle ear disease (otitis media [OM]).

“It may sound far-fetched, but when we, for the first time, reconstructed the Eustachian tubes of Neanderthals, we discovered that they are remarkably similar to those of human infants,” Downstate Health Sciences University Associate Professor Samuel Márquez, Ph.D. said in a statement. “Middle ear infections are nearly ubiquitous among infants because the flat angle of an infant’s Eustachian tubes is prone to retain the otitis media bacteria that cause these infections – the same flat angle we found in Neanderthals.”

While the Eustachian tubes of Neanderthals remained flat and shortened into adulthood, human Eustachian tubes lengthen and the angle changes as infants grow up, reducing the chances of developing ear infections because ears are able to drain better.

Because Neanderthals did not develop the kind of ear drainage humans benefit from, they were more at risk of developing other common afflictions, thus compromising their immune systems. As a result, they were a more sickly species than us, which hurt their ability to compete with us for resources in a world where survival was already difficult and uncertain.

According to the study:

“In living humans, mechanical CET dysfunction underlies OM in infants and young children, with sequelae including hearing loss, meningitis, and pneumonia. Despite proven linkage of CET malfunction with OM, the role of CET morphology in Neanderthal health and disease remains unstudied. We reconstructed Neanderthal CET morphology, comparing their crania to a modern human growth series. Methods included geometric morphometrics and univariate measures among Procrustes‐fitted coordinates. Results showed Neanderthal adults exhibiting primitively tall and narrow nasopharynges with infant‐like horizontal CET and choanal orientation. As horizontal CET orientation is associated with increased OM incidence in infants and children until around age six, its appearance in Neanderthal adults strongly indicates persistence of high OM susceptibility at this time. This could have compromised fitness and disease load relative to sympatric modern humans, affecting Neanderthals’ ability to compete within their ecological niche, and potentially contributing to their rapid extinction.”

“It’s not just the threat of dying of an infection,” Dr. Márquez said. “If you are constantly ill, you would not be as fit and effective in competing with your Homo sapien cousins for food and other resources. In a world of survival of the fittest, it is no wonder that modern man, not Neanderthal, prevailed.”

Indeed, Neanderthals died out 40,000 years ago despite being able to make fire, hunt, manufacture jewelry and develop a unique culture of their own.

The team was able to discover this new anatomical information about Neanderthals by reconstructing their ears based on ear canal remains.

“The strength of the study lies in reconstructing the cartilaginous Eustachian tube,” noted child health specialist and Distinguished Professor and Chairman of Otolaryngology at SUNY Downstate Richard Rosenfeld, MD, MPH, MBA said. “This new and previously unknown understanding of middle ear function in Neanderthals is what allows us to make new inferences regarding the impact on their health and fitness.”

Not only does this new information help us understand Neanderthals and why they disappeared, but it also teaches us not to neglect even the simplest explanations to solve mysteries.

“Here is yet another intriguing twist on the ever-evolving Neanderthal story, this time involving a part of the body that researchers had almost entirely neglected,” American Museum of National History Curator Emeritus and paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall, Ph.D. said. “It adds to our gradually emerging picture of the Neanderthals as very close relatives who nonetheless differed in crucial respects from modern man.”

Interestingly enough, ear canal remains also helped a separate team of researchers discover that Neanderthals easily developed a condition known today as swimmer’s ear. Neanderthals lived near the coastline, thus they utilized the ocean for food resources, which means they often dove under the water to gather seafood such as clams and shellfish. And because of this, they developed swimmer’s ear, which they would have been especially susceptible to developing because of their flat Eustachian tubes that had not lengthened by adulthood like our own.

Clearly, modern humans had an advantage over the Neanderthals within our own ears that enabled us to grow out of developing childhood ear infections that could have resulted in other more major afflictions. Neanderthals were not as lucky, so they were less healthy.

Of course, they likely solved this ultimately by interbreeding with Homo sapiens, which is why Neanderthal DNA is still found in the human genome today. Had Neanderthals not mated with humans, they would have died out completely because of a childhood ear infection and other illnesses. Interbreeding also hastened their disappearance but helped them overcome these ear infections and avoid total extinction on a genetic level.

Related: Researchers says UV radiation caused by a polar shift may have taken out the Neanderthals

More about Neanderthals and how their DNA is with us today from SciShow

Featured Image: Comparison of faces of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal, Daniela Hitzemann (left photograph), Stefan Scheer (right photograph) / unknown (reconstructions) via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

YouTube Video Here: https://www.youtube.com/embed/8i6Yf8gSVec?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1

It’s a common stereotype that extraterrestrials may have green skin color, from green Martians to the Egyptian god Osiris, depicted with greenish skin. Ancient Celtic mythology often depicts the Green Man, dating back before the Roman Empire. And, in 12th century England, there is the story of the curious Green Children of Woolpit. This story appears to have been based on real people who may have descendants today.

The story is woven together from accounts by two famous English chroniclers, William of Newburgh, a monk from the Augustinian priory of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall, a monk of the Cistercian abbey. Coggeshall heard the story from a man named Richard de Calne and wrote about it in the Chronicon Anglicanum around 1189. William of Newburgh wrote about it later in Historia rerum Anglicarum, published in 1220.

The story

In the mid 12th century in the English county of Suffolk, there was an ancient town called Woolpit. In Old English, the town’s name was wulf-pytt, named for pits dug in the ground to catch roaming wolves in those days. The wolves were killing livestock and terrorizing villagers, but today, this village is famous for two Green Children on its sign.

Around 1150, during the reign of King Stephen, villagers reaping the fields came across two children near a wolf pit who were acting distressed and speaking to each other in an unknown language. A version of the tale says they emerged from the wolf pit, twice as tall as the children and a couple of hundred square feet in area.

Related: An 800-ton monolith from Japan and its similarity to tales of strange otherworldly visitors

The children wore strange clothes unfamiliar to the villagers and spoke an unrecognizable language. And then, of course, their skin was green, a startling sight, but otherwise, they appeared to be normal children.

In Ralph of Coggeshall’s story, the children were taken in by Sir Richard de Calne, the man who told him the story. There, they were offered food but reacted to everything they were given as if they had never seen it before and refused to eat.

It seemed as if the children would starve until they came across something familiar: green beans. In Coggeshall’s story, they find the beans in the garden and gobble them up. In another telling, the children spotted a servant carrying a plate of beans and immediately wanted them. Thereafter, the children were fed beans but slowly weaned over to other food. As their diet changed, the green coloration of their skin began to appear normal.

Sadly, the boy died soon afterward, succumbing to an unknown illness after a period of severe melancholy and lethargy. However, the girl survived and was named Agnes. As she adjusted to her new life, she learned English and could finally answer questions about where she and her brother came from.

A green twilight world

According to Historic UK:

“We are inhabitants of the land of St. Martin, who is regarded with peculiar veneration in the country which gave us birth.”
“We are ignorant [of how we arrived here]; we only remember this, that on a certain day, when we were feeding our father’s flocks in the fields, we heard a great sound, such as we are now accustomed to hear at St. Edmund’s, when the bells are chiming; and whilst listening to the sound in admiration, we became on a sudden, as it were, entranced, and found ourselves among you in the fields where you were reaping.”
“The sun does not rise upon our countrymen; our land is little cheered by its beams; we are contented with that twilight, which, among you, precedes the sun-rise, or follows the sunset. Moreover, a certain luminous country is seen, not far distant from ours, and divided from it by a very considerable river.”

Another version of the story says the children were herding their father’s cattle and heard the bells, then entered into a cave and came out into Woolfpit. They couldn’t find the way back and were discovered by the villagers.

Agnes was baptized and lived and worked for Sir Richard and later was married to the archdeacon of Ely, Richard Barre. The couple had at least one child, thus her descendants may exist today.

According to the East Anglian Daily Times, Agnes was known for her “very wanton and impudent” behavior while in the employ of de Calne and that Richard Barre was a man from King’s Lynn in Norfolk, then a senior ambassador for Henry II.

“It is said that England’s blue blood, even today, has a green tinge through Agnes’ bloodline.”

See more from Today I Found Out:

The source claims that finding the descendants has been tricky, perhaps a carefully-guarded local secret.

“In 1978, local author and folk singer Bob Roberts wrote in A Slice of Suffolk that: ‘I was told there are still people in Woolpit who are ‘descended from the green children’, but nobody would tell me who they are!’”

Who were the Green Children?

To this day, mystery surrounds this story and many people believe these children came from another world or dimension. Is it possible they came through some sort of portal and ended up in the relatively densely populated English town?

Did they really come from a twilight place where everyone had green skin? Why were they so unfamiliar with bright sunlight? Why did they only recognize and accept green beans, refusing other foods? Lastly, if they were ordinary children, why didn’t any relatives ever try to find them?

Now it’s clearly much more fun to imagine the Green Children came from another realm. And, historically, there are similar ancient tales of celestial beings who existed in an underground or hidden world, accessed via portals or “fairy rings” at ancient megalithic structures.

The Tuatha Dé Danann of Ireland were a pre-Celtic Irish tribe of legends that say they were ‘shining beings’ forced to remove themselves to the underground. They may have been driven away by the Celts, who often depicted the Green Man. Today the Tuatha live on in modern fairy tales and epic movies and novels about elves such as Lord of the Rings.

More from Pique:

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Theories and speculation

The more likely explanations, and one that echos a dark fairytale called the “Babes in the Woods” tale, first published in 1595.

According to the Guardian:

“It told the story of a wicked uncle who hires a couple of murderers to kill his orphaned niece and nephew (because, if they die young, he will inherit their estate). The assassins take pity on the children and abandon them in the wood – where they get lost, starve and eventually perish.”

Another theory along the lines of this terrible tale is that the children were poisoned with arsenic by an earl from Norfolk, which tinted their skin green.

An interesting side note: In the 19th century, arsenic and copper were used to dye fabrics green. “Paris green” and “Scheele’s green” were popular colors worn by the social elite in Europe. Arsenic was also found in candy, paper, toys, wallpaper, and medicine before people knew it was deadly toxic. Thus, many in Victorian society died mysteriously. Symptoms could include green hands, yellow nails, and crater-like scars.

If arsenic poisoning was not to blame for the green skin, then “the green sickness” called chlorosis, may be to blame. The condition caused a green complexion and results from iron deficiency. This might explain why Agnes lost her green skin over time as her diet changed.

A third theory is that the Green Children were Flemish victims of persecution during the battle at Fornham in 1173. According to Mental Floss:

“Fornham St. Martin was a nearby village, separated from Woolpit by a river and just a few miles from Bury St. Edmunds, where loud bells often chimed. It’s possible that the children had been orphaned, suffered a poor diet while lost and on their own, and eventually made their way to Woolpit from Fornham St. Martin by following the clanging bells.”

If you consider all the theories, there is still no clear and definite answer. If Agnes and her brother were Flemish children who had lost their parents, why does she make no mention of losing her father? She said she was herding her father’s cows by one account, but doesn’t mention anything out of the ordinary. Why does one account suggest that the green skin coloration was the norm in their place of origin? And lastly, how did the children end up in a pit in the ground after traveling through a cavern?

Abundant questions remain about the Green Children of Woolpit, which makes it a fascinating mystery today.

More from Beyond Science:

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Featured image: Screenshot via YouTube

For 1,400 years, the ancient Assyrian empire dominated the Middle East ruling an area stretching from Turkey to Egypt and east to Iran through what is today Northern Saudi Arabia and Iraq. And then it all fell apart because of a megadrought caused by climate change.

The Assyrians were truly a superpower of the time, excelling in warfare, art, politics, and economics. Considered the first real empire in history, the Assyrians armed themselves with iron weapons, making their armies a formidable foe unmatched on the battlefield. As such, the Assyrians easily and swiftly conquered lands to add to their dominion.

At the height of Assyrian dominance, known as the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911 and 609 BC) that followed the Old Assyrian and Middle Assyrian empires, the culture flourished, the people prospered and life was good. This is not the typical story one often hears about somewhere in the Middle East, but that was the Assyrian experience.

Until it all came crashing down…

For a long time, historians have attributed the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire to civil strife and military defeat, both of which were factors in the fall.

The death of a ruler in 627 BC and a series of civil wars seriously weakened the empire. Smelling blood in the water, the Babylonians and the Persians teamed up along with the Scythians and Cimmerians. This alliance attacked Assyria, culminating in the siege of the capital at Harran in 609 BC. During the siege King Ashur-uballit II was presumably killed and the city fell, bringing an end to the once-mighty empire.

But a new study has revealed that something totally out of the control of the Assyrians contributed to the fall of their empire and that something is climate change.

During the height of their power, the Assyrians enjoyed not only a wealth of treasure but a wealth of precipitation, resulting in a wet climate that allowed them to continuously grow cereals in their agrarian culture. This excellent crop yield for two centuries fueled the Neo-Assyrian Empire’s growth. After all, the empire was able to grow enough food to keep the people happy and their army fed, a crucial element in any effort to expand control over a region.

Related: Archaeologists discover ancient ‘Cheerios’ in Austria dating back to 1000 BCE

However, what the Earth provides, the Earth can also take away. Long before the Industrial Revolution when humans all of sudden could cause climate change like we are currently doing now, cyclical climate change could also wreak havoc. And that appears to be what happened to Assyria when a megadrought lasting for 60 years crippled food production, contributing to domestic strife that may have played a role in the civil wars and weakened the empire enough that their enemies banded together to take advantage of an opportunity to conquer their top competitor.

“Previous explanations for the empire’s collapse have focused on political instability and wars,” California State University professor and lead study author Dr. Ashish Sinha explained in a statement. “The role of climate change was largely ignored, in part because of a lack of high-resolution paleoclimate records from the region.”

In an effort to find climate records, Sinha and her team analyzed stalagmites inside a cave in Iraq. Like rings inside a tree can tell us about climate, stalagmites also carry a record of rainfall or lack thereof in the area over thousands of years, making them perfect to tell a side of history that is often overlooked.

“Our team analyzed drip water that got fossilized in two stalagmites in Kuna Ba Cave in northern Iraq,” University of Colorado Boulder scientist and study co-author Dr. Adam Schneider said. “Because the oxygen and carbon isotope composition in different layers of the cave formations can be used to infer changes in precipitation at a high temporal resolution, we get a much better proxy than anything else we had previously. And because the isotope record went all the way up to 2007, we were able to correlate the stable carbon and oxygen isotope ratios with modern instrumental climate information from the region.”

The problem for Assyria is that the same areas perfect for agriculture were also vulnerable to disasters such as drought. The empire relied on seasonal rains to grow their crops, putting them at a distinct disadvantage to enemies like the Babylonians, who irrigated their crops. So, when a drought hit the region, the Assyrians lost their ability to keep their crops watered while the Babylonians did not.

“Since the empire was highly dependent on agriculture, the megadrought would have likely exacerbated political unrest and may have encouraged invading armies that ultimately led to Assyrian collapse,” the study authors said. “Our data suggest that the recent multi-year droughts, if they were to continue over a century, would constitute the worst episodes of regional drought in the last four millennia.”

Empires can weather short periods of drought, but a drought lasting several decades is not something any nation can really prepare for. Yale professor of archaeology Harvey Weiss explained this “mother of all catastrophes” and how it solves the mystery of why Nineveh, the largest city in the world at the time, was abandoned by the Assyrians and never reoccupied, even after the empire was conquered.

“We have a historical and environmental dynamic between north and south and between rain-fed agriculture and irrigation-fed agriculture through which we can understand the historical process of how the Babylonians were able to defeat the Assyrians,” Weiss said. “This fits into a historical pattern that is not only structured through time and space but a time and space that is filled with environmental change. These societies experienced climatic changes that were of such magnitude they could not simply adapt to them.”

Related: Researchers rewrite Mayan history after discovering early evidence of ‘total war’ that led to collapse

The results not only help us learn more about how ancient empires collapsed, but they also help us learn more about drought events in our modern world.

“The severity of the Assyrian megadrought is comparable in magnitude to the post-1980 CE drought inferred from our speleothem record—an observation that provides critical context for both historical and modern droughts,” the study published by Science Advances reports.

Severe climate events such as droughts are capable of generating regional unrest the longer they last because people get desperate. This forces people to confront their leaders or topple them or even migrate elsewhere.

This study should serve as a lesson to the superpowers of our time such as the United States. The United States is already experiencing worse droughts along with wildfires and water insecurity. As climate change becomes more uncontrollable, we could witness the fall of the American empire someday in the near future. The difference between the United States and the Assyrians is that we have the power to reverse climate change or at least prevent the worst effects of it from taking place. The climate change of our time is human-driven, so we can do something about it.

Related: Are billionaires buying up land away from the coasts based on prophecies or inside information?

Perhaps the Assyrians could have done something about it by developing an irrigation system to rely on during harder times. But, again, they could not have known there would be a drought that lasted 60 years.

In the end, the Assyrian empire fell, but there are still Assyrian people living in the Middle East today in parts of Iraq and Syria, which means the Assyrian culture never really disappeared even though the empire did.

Related: What happened to the Anasazi people? Science may have figured it out

More about the Assyrian Empire by TED-Ed:

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Featured Image: Neo-Assyrian Bas-Relief of Lion Hunt by Gary Todd via Flickr, public domain