There is a wonderful Australian poem by A.D. Hope about a thousand-year-old bone found in 1901 in Norway which had been inscribed with Viking runes. It concludes:

And, in a foreign tongue,
A man, who is not he,
Reads and his heart is wrung
This ancient grief to see,
And thinks: When I am dung,
What bone shall speak for me?

Perhaps an anthropologist with a poetic bent will be inspired to write something similar after reading the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Hidden under the exceedingly dry headline of “Craniosynostosis in the Middle Pleistocene human Cranium 14 from the Sima de los Huesos, Atapuerca, Spain” is another tale of ancient grief.

Cranium 14 was discovered in the famous archeological site of Atapuerca. Scattered throughout several caves in the area are the bones and tools of the earliest humans found in Europe. Sima de los Huesos (the pit of the bones) contains the most interesting findings. This site is located at the bottom of a 13-metre (50-foot) deep chimney which has to be accessed by scrambling through caves. It contains thousands of bone fragments belonging to 28 people of both sexes.

No one knows exactly how and why the bones tumbled there, but it may have been a burial ground. Another theory is that they were washed there when the cave flooded. No matter. The point is that more than 30 fragments belonged to a little girl aged between 5 and 12. She lived 530,000 years ago and is known to us only as Cranium 14.

Any relics this old offer precious clues to the lives of our distant ancestors. But when researchers reconstructed these fragments, they discovered something very surprising: the child may have been severely mentally retarded. They know this because she clearly suffered from craniosynostosis, a birth defect in which the skull segments close too early, producing facial deformities and interfering with the development of the brain.

The particular skull distortion of the child in Sima de Huesos affects fewer than 6 in 200,000 individuals in living humans. It must be very distressing for parents. The head can be large and misshapen, the eyes can bulge out. The children can be blind and deaf. Their limbs may be deformed. They may have seizures and feed poorly. Cranio-facial surgery works wonders and after many, many operations, an affected child can lead something like a normal life. Even so, the story of a child with the condition makes for painful reading. Many doctors would advise mothers to terminate the pregnancy.

Here’s the remarkable thing. The hunter-gatherer Middle Pleistocene family of Cranium 14 cared for the child, the researchers say. Otherwise she could not possibly have survived for at least five years. In the dry-as-dust words of the article’s authors, “It is obvious that the [Sima de Huesos] hominin species did not act against the abnormal/ill individuals during the infancy, as has happened along our own history many times and in many cultures”.

They go on to say: “Cranium 14 is the earliest documented case of craniosynostosis with resulting neurocranial, brain deformities, and, very likely, asymmetries of the facial skeleton. Despite these handicaps, this individual survived for >5 years, suggesting that her/his pathological condition was not an impediment to receive the same attention as any other Middle Pleistocene Homo child”. ~ London Telegraph, Mar 31; El Pais, Mar 31