Neanderthals Had Headaches: Evolution Meets Medicine

Could Neanderthals really have suffered from headaches? And did some of those ancient headaches eventually become ours? In Neanderthals Had Headaches: Evolution Meets Medicine, neurologist and headache specialist Lawrence Robbins, MD, takes us millions of years into our evolutionary past to explore an intriguing question: How much of what troubles the human body today began long before modern humans existed? The answer takes us into Neanderthal genetics, migraine, pain sensitivity, inflammation, skull anatomy, Chiari malformation, and the remarkable consequences of one of humanity’s defining developments – walking upright on two feet. Evolution, Dr. Robbins reminds us, does not design perfect bodies. It tinkers. It makes trade-offs. And it certainly does not care whether we are comfortable. Some traits that helped our ancestors survive may have left modern humans vulnerable to headaches, back and neck pain, anxiety, inflammation, and other conditions. Could Neanderthal DNA have increased our sensitivity to pain? Did their powerful neck and jaw muscles cause headaches? Could modern migraine be partly connected to ancient immune responses? And why hasn’t evolution simply eliminated troublesome conditions like migraine? Drawing on neurology, genetics, evolutionary medicine, paleoneurology, and even chaos theory, Dr. Robbins examines the evidence while remaining refreshingly open about what we know, what we suspect, and what remains unanswered. Informative, occasionally speculative, and written with genuine fascination for the strange story of being human, Neanderthals Had Headaches invites readers to look at modern medicine from a very different direction: backward.