Fossil of jawbone suggests primitive hominids took care of each

PARIS -- Neanderthals might not have been as savage as we think. A 200,000-year-old jawbone discovered in France suggests the primitive hominids took care of each other, in this case feeding a toothless peer, an international team of experts said Friday.

A damaged jawbone, discovered last year in southern France, shows that its owner survived without teeth for up to several years -- impossible without a helping hand from his or her peers, said Canadian paleontologist Serge Lebel.

Lebel directed an international team of experts who discovered the fossil in July 2000. Also on the team was the noted specialist of the Neanderthal period Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St. Louis and colleagues from Germany, Portugal and France.

"This individual must have been quite weak and needed preparation of his or her food, and the social group probably took care of him or her," Lebel said at a news conference.

"We mustn't dehumanize these beings. They show an entirely human kind of behavior," added Lebel, who works at the University of Quebec in Montreal.

The discovery may push back ideas of the beginning of social care by 150,000 years, Lebel said. A similar infection that caused a hominid to lose his teeth had previously only been found in fossils dating back 50,000 years, he said.

The team's findings were published in the Sept. 25 issue of the U.S. periodical Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

However, University of Pittsburgh anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz was skeptical.

The discovery is "interesting, but there might be a larger story here," he said. "You can eat a lot without your teeth. There is no reason to think the individual couldn't have been chewing soft food -- snails, mollusks, even worms.

"We like to think of Neanderthals as rough and tumble, always going after the mammoth," Schwartz said, "but it seems likely that they exploited whatever was around them."

Evidence of the controlled use of fire and tools for cutting that were unearthed around the fossil show a level of domestic organization also previously thought to have started much later, Lebel said.