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ABSTRACT The Selk'nam were an indigenous population of Tierra del Fuego that are now extinct. Contemporary accounts, including those of Robert Fitzroy and Charles Darwin, attest to their prodigious size and strength. These accounts and others record that the Selk'nam were enthusiastic wrestlers and fought till one or other of the opponents could no longer continue. Presented here is a case of traumatic injury to the ulnae and radii of a Selk'nam male that is concomitant with injuries sustained during such activity and as such would provide intriguing evidence of this practice in the skeletal record of an extinct human population. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents abstracts of proffered papers of meeting held by Society for the Study of Human Biology which was held at the University of Cambridge on May 8, 2003. Some of the papers discussed here are: "What the "Body-Beautiful" Might Be Telling Us About the "Body-Healthy"" by S. Lewis of Chester College from Chester, England. "The Cognitive Abilities of Cebus Apella Libidinosus: Tool Use and Survival in a Harsh Environment" by A.C. De Moura and P.C. Lee from University of Cambridge, located in England. "A Review of Neanderthal and Selk'nam Long Bone Trauma Frequency" by S. UnderDown, University of Cambridge, located in England.

The impact of endemic and epidemic disease on humans has traditionally been seen as a comparatively recent historical phenomenon associated with the Neolithisation of human groups, an increase in population size led by sedentarism, and increasing contact with domesticated animals as well as species occupying opportunistic symbiotic and ectosymbiotic relationships with humans. The orthodox approach is that Neolithisation created the conditions for increasing population size able to support a reservoir of infectious disease sufficient to act as selective pressure. This orthodoxy is the result of an overly simplistic reliance on skeletal data assuming that no skeletal lesions equated to a healthy individual, underpinned by the assumption that hunter-gatherer groups were inherently healthy while agricultural groups acted as infectious disease reservoirs. The work of van Blerkom, Am. J. Phys. Anthropol., vol. suppl 37 (2003), Wolfe et al., Nature, vol. 447 (2007) and Houldcroft and Underdown, Am. J. Phys. Anthropol., vol. 160, (2016) has changed this landscape by arguing that humans and pathogens have long been fellow travelers. The package of infectious diseases experienced by our ancient ancestors may not be as dissimilar to modern infectious diseases as was once believed. The importance of DNA, from ancient and modern sources, to the study of the antiquity of infectious disease, and its role as a selective pressure cannot be overstated. Here we consider evidence of ancient epidemic and endemic infectious diseases with inferences from modern and ancient human and hominin DNA, and from circulating and extinct pathogen genomes. We argue that the pandemics of the past are a vital tool to unlock the weapons needed to fight pandemics of the future., (© 2023 The Authors. American Journal of Biological Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.)

Analysis of pathogen genome data sequenced from clinical and historical samples has made it possible to perform phylogenetic analyses of sexually transmitted infections on a global scale, and to estimate the diversity, distribution, and coevolutionary host relationships of these pathogens, providing insights into pathogen emergence and disease prevention. Deep-sequenced pathogen genomes from clinical studies and ancient samples yield estimates of within-host and between-host evolutionary rates and provide data on changes in pathogen genomic stability and evolutionary responses. Here we examine three groups of pathogens transmitted mainly through sexual contact between modern humans to provide insight into ancient human behavior and history with their pathogens. Exploring ancient pathogen genomic divergence and the ancient viral-host parallel evolutionary histories will help us to reconstruct the origin of present-day geographical distribution and diversity of clinical pathogen infections, and will hopefully allow us to foresee possible environmentally induced pathogen evolutionary responses. Lastly, we emphasize that ancient pathogen DNA research should be combined with modern clinical pathogen data, and be equitable and provide advantages for all researchers worldwide, e.g., through shared data.

The Neanderthals were a Eurasian human species of the genus Homo that disappeared approximately 30,000 years ago. The cause or causes of their extinction continues to intrigue specialists and non-specialists alike. Here a contributory role for Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs) is suggested. TSEs could have infected Neanderthal groups as a result of general cannibalistic activity and brain tissue consumption in particular. Further infection could then have taken place through continued cannibalistic activity or via shared used of infected stone tools. A modern human hunter-gatherer proxy has been developed and applied as a hypothetical model to the Neanderthals. This hypothesis suggests that the impact of TSEs on the Neanderthals could have been dramatic and have played a large part in contributing to the processes of Neanderthal extinction.