This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Health care isn't just a benefit of the modern human age.

It goes way back, all the way even to the Neanderthals.

We imagine that they will have been cleaning wounds, dressing wounds.

Penny Spikens, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the University of York in the UK.

They may have used things like splints

when you've got sort of broken limbs.

We know they had some forms of painkillers.

And they most likely needed them,

because remains of Neanderthals show

that most individuals seem to have suffered a serious injury at least once.

The key detail being that those injuries didn't always kill them.

Spikens and her team catalogued more than 30 cases of Neanderthals who'd been injured but didn't die of their wounds to investigate the pattern of health care in pre-modern humans.

And they concluded that health care may have been key to Neanderthals colonizing extreme

environments and pursuing dangerous prey like mammoths and woolly rhinos.

Health care wasn't just something cultural for Neanderthals. It also performed an ecological function. It allows them to

punch above their weight as a predator. Their conclusions are in the journal

Quaternary science reviews. And the results are just one more reminder

that Neanderthals shared many of the qualities

we think of as uniquely human,

except of course that they never made it out of the Pleistocene.

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