What Did Ancient Humans Do When They Caught a Cold?

Your nose blocked at three in the morning last night. You woke up breathing through your mouth, and you reached into the dark for a paper square, because that is what a person does. Nobody in your family line ever did that. Not one ancestor, in a line running back to the first fire, had anything at all to catch it in. So what did they do? You find out what a cold actually is first, because you have it the wrong way round. The blocked nose, the ache, the fever, the lost appetite - none of that is the virus damaging you. It is your own immune system firing at full power, and you feeling every second of it. You learn how much fluid your body makes on a completely healthy day, and where most of it really is. Then you find out how old the throwaway tissue is, what it was originally sold for, and how many years passed before anybody suggested blowing your nose into one. Then the correction almost nobody makes. It is tempting to say a band of thirty people was too small to keep a cold alive - and it is false. You learn why the common cold gets through anyway, and what your ancestors were spared instead: the killers that need a quarter of a million people packed together, and a herd of animals living inside the fence. You look one sick Neanderthal in the mouth, at a cave in northern Spain, and find out what was stuck in his teeth. You meet a broken skeleton in northern Iraq whose every wound healed, and the uncomfortable question it raises. And you reach the number this whole episode was built around: what a 2018 study counted sitting inside inherited Neanderthal DNA, and why the immune machinery that worked for you last night is not entirely your own. By the end you will know exactly what the paper square replaced - and it is not medicine. If this changed how you look at your own bedside table, hit like, subscribe for a new Ancient Humans episode, and tell me in the comments who used to sit with you when you were ill. RESEARCH AND SOURCES: Enard & Petrov (2018), "Evidence that RNA Viruses Drove Adaptive Introgression between Neanderthals and Modern Humans", Cell 175:360-371 - 152 virus-interacting proteins in Neanderthal-introgressed segments. Dannemann, Andrés & Kelso (2016), American Journal of Human Genetics 98:22-33 - archaic haplotypes at the TLR6-TLR1-TLR10 immune gene cluster. Eccles (2005), The Lancet Infectious Diseases 5:718-725 - cold and flu symptoms come from the host's own immune response. Bartlett (1957), J. Royal Statistical Society A 120:48-70 - critical community size of ~250,000-300,000 for measles (not the common cold). Black (1975), Science 187:515-518 - acute crowd viruses failed to persist in an isolated Amazonian population (modern people, not prehistoric). Wolfe, Dunavan & Diamond (2007), Nature 447:279-283 - most major human diseases crossed over from domesticated animals after agriculture. Weyrich et al. (2017), Nature 544:357-361 - El Sidrón Neanderthal dental calculus with poplar (salicylic acid) and Penicillium; self-medication is the authors' interpretation. Trinkaus & Zimmerman (1982), American Journal of Physical Anthropology 57:61-76 - Shanidar 1's healed injuries; that the group nursed him is a later, contested interpretation. Kimberly-Clark brand history - Kleenex launched 1924 as a cold-cream remover; sold as a disposable handkerchief from 1930. Daily mucus production of roughly 1-1.5 litres in a healthy adult is an approximation from clinical summaries, not a single primary source. #ancienthumans #prehistory #humanevolution #neanderthal #commoncold #stoneage #anthropology #archaeology