Did people before written history live through trauma? If you mean physical trauma, like broken bones, head wounds and violence, then yes. We can see it directly: a Neanderthal skeleton about 50,000 years old carries fractures that healed. If you mean psychological trauma, the lasting fear or distress that can follow an overwhelming event, bones can’t answer that. No skeleton records a feeling. So the honest answer has two halves. Injury before writing is documented. What those injuries meant to the people who lived through them is, for now, Unknown.
Wait, which kind of “trauma”?
The word can name a physical injury or a psychological experience. The medical history of psychological trauma needs its own timeline. In the late 1800s, doctors argued about people who survived railway crashes: were their symptoms caused by hidden physical damage, or by fright? The German physician Hermann Oppenheim used the name “traumatic neurosis” for a book describing cases from railway and workplace accidents. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) became a formal diagnosis in 1980 in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-III (Crocq and Crocq, 2000).
So an archaeologist and a psychologist can use the same word for different things. This page keeps them apart.
What can a skeleton actually tell us?
Bone is living tissue. After a break, the body builds new bone to knit it back together, and that takes time. One 2021 study of injured skeletons treated signs of new bone as meaning the person lived at least about three weeks after the injury (Crevecoeur et al., 2021).
Analogy: think of healed bone as a receipt. It proves something happened and that the body kept going long enough to repair it. It doesn’t tell you who helped, how anyone felt, or what the injury meant.
A useful way to read the evidence is as a ladder, where each step is harder to reach than the one below:
- What is physically there? A fracture, a narrowed ear canal, a missing bone.
- Did the person survive it, and for how long?
- What could they still do? This is always an inference, because nobody watched them.
- Did anyone help? Sometimes this can be argued. It is rarely settled.
- Why did anyone help, and how did anyone feel? Bones alone can’t reach this step.
Anthropologist K. A. Dettwyler made that last point sharply in 1991: skeletons can show physical impairment, but they can’t show how a person was treated, what their life was like, or what others thought of them (Dettwyler, 1991, p. 375 and pp. 383–384).
Who was Shanidar 1?
Shanidar Cave sits in the foothills of the Baradost Mountains in north-east Iraqi Kurdistan. Between 1951 and 1960, a team led by Ralph Solecki dug a trench there and found the remains of 10 Neanderthal men, women and children (Pomeroy et al., 2020). One adult man, found in 1957, is known as Shanidar 1 (Smithsonian). Initial new dates put him roughly 45,000 to 55,000 years ago (Pomeroy et al., 2020). These are approximate, early results.
A 2017 reanalysis by Erik Trinkaus and Sébastien Villotte lays out what his bones show (Trinkaus and Villotte, 2017, main article and supplementary S1 Text):
- Left eye socket: a crushing fracture that fully healed. The authors think it may have reduced vision in that eye, but vision can’t be measured from bone. [Fracture: Documented. Effect on sight: Unknown]
- Right arm: at least two breaks in the upper arm that healed crooked. His right forearm and hand were missing. The authors read the rounded-over lower end as a break that probably never knitted, followed by loss of the rest of the arm, probably by amputation. [Breaks and missing forearm: Documented. Amputation: Plausible. How it happened: Unknown]
- Legs and feet: changes in the right knee, ankle and foot, including a healed break in a foot bone, and an unusual curve in the left shin bones. The authors read these as signs of an unusual walk. [Plausible]
- Ears: bony growths narrowing both ear canals. The authors infer he was effectively deaf in his right ear and had some hearing loss in the left. [Plausible] His hearing was never tested, of course, and the ear canals were examined by eye in 1976–78, without X-rays.
- Age and time: he probably died in his forties, by the 2017 study’s estimate (40 to 50 years). Older estimates ran from 30 to 45 (Dettwyler, 1991, p. 377). [Plausible estimate]
Scientists have also changed their minds about this man. Earlier accounts described a paralyzed right arm and probable blindness in one eye (as quoted in Dettwyler, 1991, p. 377). The Smithsonian’s page still says a blow to the head damaged his brain and withered his arm (Smithsonian). The 2017 reanalysis instead traces the arm changes to breaks in the arm itself (Trinkaus and Villotte, 2017).
Violence is in the record, too
The same cave also holds signs of violence. A puncture wound to the ribs of another Neanderthal, Shanidar 3, “suggests interpersonal violence,” as the current excavation team puts it (Pomeroy et al., 2020). [Plausible]
Behind each of these skeletons is a person whose name, language and story we don’t know.
How we know
What evidence exists: skeletons, the difference between healed and unhealed bone, burial context, and dating. For Shanidar 1, the main modern account used here is one team’s 2017 reanalysis, which builds on earlier studies, including Trinkaus’s own.
Whose voices are missing: the injured people themselves and their communities. No words of theirs survive. The sources used for this page don’t include present-day Iraqi or Kurdish views on how these remains are studied and shown.
How power shaped the record: bone keeps only some stories. Deafness, blindness and mental illness often leave no mark on the skeleton (Dettwyler, 1991, p. 380), so the archive favors dramatic, bone-visible cases. Where remains end up matters too. Shanidar 1 was studied in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad in 1976–78 (Trinkaus and Villotte, 2017), and new digs at the cave, which began in 2015, run with permission from the Kurdistan General Directorate of Antiquities (Pomeroy et al., 2020).
Then vs. now
Then: for people before writing, we have no words at all. What they believed about injury, fear, pain or grief is Unknown. What we can see is what happened to bodies: injuries, healing, survival and burial.
Now: the difference between a visible injury and a psychological diagnosis matters. PTSD entered DSM-III in 1980. That history of a medical term does not give anyone a diagnosis in people who left no account of their experiences (Crocq and Crocq, 2000).
Did survivors at Shanidar carry fear or grief afterward? Many readers will assume so. Today’s diagnostic categories, though, were built in modern settings, so pinning PTSD on a Neanderthal would be a guess, not a finding. [Unknown for any individual]
Myths to retire
- “A blow to the head paralyzed his arm.” The 2017 reanalysis points to breaks in the arm itself.
- “Trauma is a modern invention.” Injury is ancient. Our vocabulary for psychological trauma is modern.
What we still don’t know
- How any of these people felt after injury or violence.
- How common injury was overall. Excavated skeletons are not a random sample of anyone.
Timeline
- c. 55,000–45,000 years ago (approximate): initial dates for Shanidar 1, 3 and 5 (Pomeroy et al., 2020).
- 1951–1960: Solecki’s excavations at Shanidar; Shanidar 1 is found in 1957.
- 1980: PTSD enters DSM-III.
- 1991: Dettwyler’s critique of reading compassion from bones.
- 2017: Trinkaus and Villotte’s hearing and injury reanalysis of Shanidar 1.