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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)

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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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Salango is located on the coast of central Ecuador, and archaeologists recently made an astonishing find there: Two infants who had been buried approximately 2,100 years ago wearing “helmets” made from the skulls of other children.

According to Live Science:

“The archaeologists who excavated the burials between 2014 and 2016 recently published the details of their findings in the journal Latin American Antiquity.

“The team says this is the only known case in which children’s skulls were used as helmets for infants being buried. The scientists don’t know what killed the infants and children.”

What exactly is the meaning of this bizarre discovery? Why would children be buried wearing the skulls of other children? And what killed these children in the first place?

The questions were almost endless, but now we’re finally starting to get some answers to help explain what was found in Ecuador.

The Ecuadorian dead

Though there’s certainly nothing unusual about unearthing skulls when excavating a burial site, in South America those skulls are usually the remains of adults who died in battle. Children are not usually the victims, Ancient Origins notes:

“The discovery of children is much less common, which makes these two children extra special.”

The helmeted children

A closer look at the children’s skulls provided more information about the “helmeted” children.

One of the infants died at 18 months old. The second was 6 to 9 months old at death, and both had the skull helmets:

“(The older child) was discovered wearing the modified cranium of a 4-12 year old juvenile in a ‘helmet-like’ fashion around its own head. The second infant … was found with a skull helmet made from another infant who had died between 2-12 years old.”

But what does it mean that the children had these skull helmets attached to them?

Protecting ‘wild souls’

Sara Juengst of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, along with others on the team that found the skulls in Ecuador, came up with a fascinating theory regarding the skull helmets:

“Juengst and colleagues suggest these unusual symbolic burials at Salango might have been an attempt to ensure the protection of what the researchers called ‘pre-social and wild’ souls. And the act of burying their children with carved stone ancestor figurines may have been a way of ‘further empowering” their heads, providing protection for the prematurely deceased children.’”

Related: The face of a man found in a ‘six-headed burial’ in Scotland is revealed

Gruesome preparation

And then there’s the matter of how the skull helmets were attached to the deceased infants, and it’s certainly not for the fainthearted, Live Science notes:

“The helmets were placed tightly over the infants’ heads, the archaeologists found. It’s likely that the older children’s skulls still had flesh on them when they were turned into helmets, because without flesh, the helmets likely would not have held together, the archaeologists noted.

“One infant’s ‘face looked through and out of the cranial vault’ — the space in the skull that holds the brain — the archaeologists wrote.”

Related: Two-Headed Mummy of Ancient Egyptian Princess And a Crocodile Revealed For The First Time In Public

Cause of death

The question that remains is what exactly killed these young children.

Prior studies in the area have been able to determine that a volcanic eruption covered the area in ash shortly before the children were buried. And that has led some to suggest that may have had a dramatic impact on the entire region around Solango:

“‘This eruption may have affected food production, and the newly discovered bones suggest the infants and children suffered from malnutrition,’ the researchers said.

“It’s possible that ‘the treatment of the two infants was part of a larger, complex ritual response to environmental consequences of the eruption,’ the archaeologists wrote, noting that ‘more evidence is needed to confirm this.’”

Babies in ancient Ecuador were buried with human skull helmets https://t.co/ibknK2v4Zf pic.twitter.com/Df6zY1R7YO

— Forbes (@Forbes) November 14, 2019

Darker forces?

However, given the history of ancient South America, a darker explanation for the skull helmets may also be plausible.

Just two years ago, a burial site in Peru was unearthed that contained the remains of 140 children who had been ritually sacrificed in some sort of bizarre appeasement of deities the Peruvians worshiped:

“Preliminary DNA analysis indicates that both boys and girls were victims and isotopic analysis indicates that they were not all drawn from local populations but from different regions of the Chimú Empire.”

More research needed

As with the bodies found the Peruvian mass grave, a great deal more research is needed to fully explain the meaning of the helmeted skulls in Ecuador:

“Juengst noted that other tests, such as those using DNA and strontium isotopes (variations of an element with different numbers of neutrons), may help to identify the owner of the bones.”

But all of the research in the world may never completely explain exactly what thought process went into placing skulls atop the heads of deceased children prior to burial. As with many things from the ancient world, some secrets are never revealed.

Related: Do descendants of the mysterious Green Children of Woolpit exist today?

For more on the subject of cranial modification in ancient times, watch this video

Featured Image via Wikipedia and Sara Jeungst/UNC Charlotte