About 800,000 years ago in what is now Spain, cannibals devoured an early human child who became known as the “Grand Doline Boy.” But a new analysis of these ancient remains revealed a surprising twist: the child was a girl.
The child was a Homo predecessor, an early hominin species that lived in Europe between 1.2 million and 800,000 years ago. Discovered in 1994 in the Gran Dolina cave in northern Spain, the Atapuerca Mountains, the species is known primarily from bone and tooth fragments, which have hampered researchers’ efforts to determine sex. H. predecessor individuals.
Recently, scientists tested a new technique, using a type of dental analysis that successfully identified males and females from other early human species. They examined the teeth of two individuals from Gran Dolina: “H1” and “H3”. H1, whose remains they defined H. predecessor species, was about 13 years old at the time of death and has long been thought to be male. The second individual, H3 – the boy of Gran Dolinei – died at the age of 11 and was also believed to be a man.
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Microscopic analysis of the tooth structure for the new study revealed variations between H1 and H3 teeth that the researchers identified as sexually dimorphic – differing in appearance between men and women. Based on comparisons with teeth from humans and other hominins, scientists have established that H1 is male, but H3 is probably female.
Certain skeleton-like characteristics, such as the shape of the pelvis, the size of the forehead ridge and the robustness of the bone to which the muscles attach, can reveal clues about the sex of missing human relatives. But these characteristics indicate only the sex of the adult skeletons, and about 75% of the remains of Gran Dolina belong to pre-adolescent children. Moreover, these cave skeletons were very fragmented, probably because they were cannibalized.
However, the teeth are often well preserved in ancient archeological sites. Other researchers have previously analyzed canine teeth to determine human sex (up to 92.3% accuracy) in populations of Neandertal from a site in Krapina, Croatia and from previous hominins on the Spanish site Sima de los Huesos (“Bone Pit”) in Atapuerca.
Dental crowns are fully formed by the age of 6 years, and because older children usually have at least part of their adult teeth, the analysis of dental characteristics “may be especially useful in paleoanthropology for estimating the sex of immature individuals” and could be applied. children remains from Gran Dolina, scientists reported March 10 in Journal of Anthropological Sciences.
The whole tooth
For the new study, the researchers looked at the upper canines – the most sexually dimorphic teeth – in H1 and H3. Using high resolution X rays scans, measured the volume of tissue and the area of the two teeth and compared them with existing dental scans from modern humans, remnants of the Krapina site and the “Bone Pit” Atapuerca.
The study found that the H3 canine had more surface enamel than the H1 canine, a feature associated with female teeth. By comparison, the canine from H1 had a taller crown with more dentin, the dense, bony tissue beneath the enamel; The higher dentin content is a feature of male teeth, scientists have reported. Because H1’s canines were also unusually large, experts had previously guessed that the individual was male, and the new analysis confirmed this hypothesis. However, the differences between canines H1 and H3 matched the sexually dimorphic variations in other human teeth, suggesting that H3 was female.
“Gran Dolina’s boy” would have really been “Gran Dolinei’s girl”, said in a statement the main author of the study Cecilia García-Campos, physical anthropologist at CENIEH.
The girl was between 9 and 11 years old when she was killed and eaten, according to the study. And she wasn’t the only victim; the remnants of 22 H. predecessor individuals in Gran Dolina showed signs of being cannibalized, with bones showing cuts, fractures where they had been opened to expose the marrow and even traces of teeth, Live Science previously reported.
One possible explanation for this ancient cannibalism is that humans were easier to catch and feed than other animals, the researchers wrote in 2019 in Journal of Human Evolution. Compared to other types of prey, “a lot of food could be obtained from humans at a low cost,” said CENIEH researcher Jesús Rodríguez, lead author of the 2019 study. in a statement that year.
Originally published on Live Science.