3:24am December 26, 2013

➸ Paleopathology!

nicocoer:

So many books I want to read! But for now I need to stick to non-human bones, cleaning, beetles, and specimen prep.

I was looking through some books on amazon in hopes of finding some good stuff on Dermestid beetles and the search eventually sucked me into paleopathology via a book on the…

I have posted about this on tumblr only to have people incredibly skeptical and saying I was probably misinterpreting things and that we couldn’t possibly know so much about prehistoric societies and disability and etc.

And it’s like.

How else can you interpret that people survived into old age who would never have walked or even been able to chew their own food? If they survived then somebody helped them. But apparently even that tiny bit of knowledge is too much for some people, because whenever I post it I get flat disbelief.

I guess everyone wants to believe that we were some horrible interpretation of “primitive” back then. That the roots of actually caring about each other and being a social species somehow don’t reach back that far. Etc. Ugh ugh ugh.

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