Science has come a long way in figuring out what's best for the human body, and it wasn't even that long ago smoking and drinking while pregnant were A-OK! So that same sort of medical knowledge in the Stone Age must have been way wrong, right?

It seems so. In 2018, Washington University anthropologist Erik Trinkaus had what Discover called a "pivotal realization" and fortunately, he published a paper on the strangeness that he saw in Stone Age remains. Trinkaus picked 66 Stone Age skeletons from people who had lived between 10,000 and 100,000 years ago, and who had visible deformities. Two thirds of the diagnosed conditions were "rare" or "extremely rare". So, what's going on here? Trinkaus found that it wasn't just about poor nutrition or a lack of medical knowledge; he found that many of the conditions were genetic, and that led him to the conclusion that small, close-knit communities of people living far, far away from others led to a fair amount of inbreeding — and that led to the high rates of severe deformities. 

It's not all bad news, though. In 2010, The New York Times picked up the story of Burial 9, a 4,000-year-old skeleton discovered in Vietnam. He had been paralyzed as a child by Klippel-Feil syndrome, lived at least a decade beyond that, and was proof that even millennia ago, there were people willing to be caretakers for those who needed them the most. You go, humanity!

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