About 800,000 years ago in what is now Spain, cannibals devoured an early human child who became known as ‘The Son of Gran Dolina’. But a new analysis of this ancient remains revealed a surprising twist: the child was a girl.
The child was a Gay predecessor, an early hominin species that lived in Europe between 1.2 million and 800,000 years ago. The species was discovered in 1994 in the Gran Dolina Cave in the Atapuerca Mountains in northern Spain, and is best known from fragments of bones and teeth, which highlighted the efforts of researchers to determine the sex of H. predecessor individuals.
Recently, scientists have been testing a new technique using a type of dental analysis that has successfully identified males and females in other early human species. They examined teeth of two Gran Dolina individuals: “H1” and “H3”. H1, the remains of which are the H. predecessor species, was at the time of death about 13 years old and long considered male. The second individual, H3 – The Boy of Gran Dolina – dies at the age of 11 and is also considered male.
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Microscopic analysis of the tooth structure for the new study revealed variations between H1 and H3 teeth that researchers identified as sexually dimorphic – differing in appearance between men and women. Based on comparisons with human teeth and other hominins, the scientists determined that H1 is male, but H3 is probably female.
Certain skeleton characteristics such as the shape of the pelvis, the size of the forehead and the robustness of the bone where the muscles get stuck can reveal clues about the gender of extinct family members. But these characteristics indicate only the gender of skeletons for adults, and about 75% of the remains of Gran Dolina belong to pre-adolescent children. On top of that, those cave skeletons were very fragmented, probably because they were cannibalized.
However, teeth are very well preserved in ancient archaeological sites. Other researchers have previously analyzed dog teeth to determine sex in humans (with an accuracy of up to 92.3%) in populations Neanderthal people from a site in Krapina, Croatia, and in former hominins of the Spanish Sima de los Huesos (‘Pit of Bones’) site in Atapuerca.
Dental crowns are fully formed at age 6, and since older children usually have at least some of their adult teeth, the analysis of dental features may be “particularly useful in paleoanthropology to estimate the sex of immature individuals,” and may be based on the children are applied. remains of Gran Dolina, the scientists reported on March 10 in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences.
The whole tooth
For the new study, the researchers looked at upper dogs – the most sexually dimorphic teeth – of H1 and H3. Use high resolution X-ray scans, they measured the tissue volume and surface area of the two teeth, and compared it to the existing teeth of modern humans, remnants of the Krapina site and of Atapuerca’s “Pit of Bones”.
The authors of the study discovered that the dogs of H3 have more surface enamel than H1’s dogs, a trait associated with female teeth. By comparison, the dog from H1 had a higher crown with more dentine, the dense, bony tissue beneath the enamel; a higher dentin content is a characteristic of male teeth, according to the scientists. Because H1’s canines were also extraordinarily large, experts had previously guessed that the individual was male, and the new analysis confirms the hypothesis. However, the differences between the H1 and H3 dogs were consistent with sexual dimorphic variations in other human teeth, suggesting that H3 was female.
” The Boy of Gran Dolina ‘would really have been’ The Girl of Gran Dolina, ‘”lead study author Cecilia García-Campos, a physical anthropologist at CENIEH, said in the statement.
The girl was said to have been between 9 and 11 years old when she was killed and eaten. And she was not the only victim; the surplus of 22 H. predecessor individuals in Gran Dolina showed signs of being cannibalized, with bones showing cuts, fractures where they were cracked open to expose the marrow, and even tooth marks, Live Science reported earlier.
One possible explanation for this old cannibalism is that humans were easier to catch and more nutritious than other animals, researchers said in 2019 in the Journal of Human Evolution. Compared to other types of prey, ‘a lot of food can be obtained at low cost from humans’, said CENIEH, researcher Jesús Rodríguez, lead author of the 2019 study. in a statement that year.
Originally published on Live Science.