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I possibly should not find this as awesome as I do: they found a 120,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton with the same rare bone disease that I have! (ETA: Another article on this discovery with more detailed information on fibrous dysplasia.)
The exact cause of the disease (in humans or otherwise) is not known -- it's a rare gene mutation that happens in utero -- but it's not thought to be hereditary, so this is probably not a 100,000-years-distant ancestor of mine. But who knows? At the very least, there is something incredibly cool about feeling that kind of connection to an intelligent being of a different species who died uncountable generations ago. However unimaginably different our lives are in other ways, this long-dead teenager and I had that experience in common; what an incredible thing.
While I'm at it, here's a cool article on using DNA to shed light on Neanderthal society. (Basically, studying the DNA of a deceased Neanderthal group, scientists made the discovery that the men were all related and the women weren't, from which they infer that the group was patrilocal -- women left their own group and went to live with their husbands. How cool is it that we can learn that sort of thing about people who've been dead for 50,000 years?)
The exact cause of the disease (in humans or otherwise) is not known -- it's a rare gene mutation that happens in utero -- but it's not thought to be hereditary, so this is probably not a 100,000-years-distant ancestor of mine. But who knows? At the very least, there is something incredibly cool about feeling that kind of connection to an intelligent being of a different species who died uncountable generations ago. However unimaginably different our lives are in other ways, this long-dead teenager and I had that experience in common; what an incredible thing.
While I'm at it, here's a cool article on using DNA to shed light on Neanderthal society. (Basically, studying the DNA of a deceased Neanderthal group, scientists made the discovery that the men were all related and the women weren't, from which they infer that the group was patrilocal -- women left their own group and went to live with their husbands. How cool is it that we can learn that sort of thing about people who've been dead for 50,000 years?)
