14 DAY TRIAL // A study published in the journal PLOS ONE this May 5 details the discovery of a 120,000-year-old bone tumor in a rib that used to belong to a Neanderthal specimen.
Specialists say that this is the oldest human tumor to have ever been discovered and documented by science.
The bone inside which evidence of this tumor was found was dug out about 100 years ago, in present-day Croatia. The tumor has been identified as fibrous dysplasia, EurekAlert informs us.
This type of tumors can still be seen in humans today. They are not cancerous ones, meaning that they do not spread to surrounding tissues.
What they do is replace the inner structure of the bone with a soft, fibrous mass.
“Evidence for cancer is extremely rare in the human fossil record. This case shows that Neanderthals, living in an unpolluted environment, were susceptible to the same kind of cancer as living humans,” researcher David Frayer commented on the discovery of this bone tumor.