翻译：Neo

审校：郭晓

By caring for their sick and injured, Neandertals were able to expand into more dangerous environments and pursue more deadly prey. Christopher Intagliata reports.

通过照顾伤病员，尼安德特人得以涉足更危险的环境，以及猎取更加致命的猎物。 克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔报道。

Health care isn't just a benefit of the modern human age. It goes way back. All the way, even, to the Neandertals.

医疗保健不仅仅是现代人类社会的特殊权益。它源远流长，甚至可以追溯到尼安德特人时代。

"We imagine they would have been cleaning wounds, ressing wounds." Penny Spikins, a paleolithic archaeologist at the University of York in the U.K. "They may have used things like splints when you've got broken limbs. We know they had some forms of painkillers."

“我们设想他们已经能够清理和包扎伤口。”英国约克大学研究旧石器时代的考古学家佩妮·斯皮金斯如是说。“当有人四肢骨折的时候，他们可能会使用夹板之类的东西。我们知道他们有一些方法来止痛。”

And they most likely needed them. Because remains of Neandertals show that most individuals seem to have suffered a serious injury at least once. The key detail being that those injuries didn't always kill them.

他们很可能会用到这些止痛方法。因为尼安德特人的遗骸表明大多数人似乎至少遭受过一次严重的伤害。关键细节是那些受伤并不总是致命的。

Spikins and her team catalogued more than 30 cases of Neandertals who'd been injured but didn't die of their wounds, to investigate the pattern of health care in premodern humans. And they concluded that health care may have been key to their colonizing extreme environments, and pursuing dangerous prey, like mammoths and woolly rhinos.

斯皮金斯和她的团队给超过30例曾经受伤但并未因此死亡的尼安德特人案例进行了分类，来研究前现代人类的医疗保健模式。他们得出结论的是，医疗保健措施可能是尼安德特人征服极端自然环境，以及狩猎诸如猛犸象和长毛犀牛这样危险猎物的关键因素。

"Health care wasn't just something cultural for Neandertals. It also performed an ecological function. It allowed them to punch above their weight as a predator."

“医疗保健不仅仅是尼安德特人的某种文化，它同时也起到了生态方面的作用。这让尼安德特人发挥出捕食者的能力。”

Their conclusions are in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews. [Penny Spikins et al., Living to fight another day: The ecological and evolutionary significance of Neanderthal healthcare]

这一结论发表在《第四纪科学评论》（Quaternary Science Reviews）杂志上。

And the results are one more reminder that Neandertals shared many of the qualities we think of as human. Except, of course, that they never made it out of the Pleistocene.

这一结论提醒我们尼安德特人的许多特质和现代智人有相通之处。当然，除了他们没能活过更新世。