As a pediatrician who talks a lot about ear infections with parents, this finding is fascinating. One of the facts that brings relief to parents of children with chronic otitis media is that they tend to grow out of it, due to the shifting eustacian tube anatomy cited in the article. Adults and older children get ear infections from time to time, but on the whole, they’re rare. It seems this wasn’t the case for Neanderthal.
I wonder if there’s any evidence of rudimentary surgeries (ie, shove a small sharp stick through the tympanic membrane) to relieve the painful pressure. This would likely disrupt the bones on the middle ear, though I imagine this is difficult/impossible to study in the fossil record.
Perhaps their projecting jaws were less able to exercise and clear the eustachian tubes, as any modern child (or airplane passenger) discovers early. Add to this being by themselves on the European continent for a long while and reaching equilibrium with fewer sinus problems over time by adaptation. Then being attacked brutally by diseases from a new wave of settlement out of Africa.
In North America some elapsed ~13,000 years was sufficient for the paleo population to be almost wholly destroyed by disease at first contact with Spanish explorers, by many accounts 90% dead by 1620.
I wonder if there’s any evidence of rudimentary surgeries (ie, shove a small sharp stick through the tympanic membrane) to relieve the painful pressure. This would likely disrupt the bones on the middle ear, though I imagine this is difficult/impossible to study in the fossil record.