For about fifteen years, a French anthropologist has been exploring the place of people with disabilities among our ancestors. Far from being rejected, they were always taken care of, archaeological traces reveal. On the occasion of the Paralympic Games, Valérie Delattre takes stock of her discoveries for Sciences et Avenir.
This article is taken from the monthly Sciences et Avenir n°931, dated September 2024.
It all started with an encounter. About fifteen years ago, archaeoanthropologist Valérie Delattre, a specialist in funerary and religious practices from protohistory to the Middle Ages, crossed paths with Paralympic champion Ryadh Sallem. He asked her: “How did people like me do it before? “Valérie Delattre understands that archaeology has never really asked itself this question and decides to try to answer it.
Today, the woman who directs a program called “Archaeology of Disability” within the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) has contributed to the scientific existence of this axis, which is so revealing of societies of the past. “Previously, ‘extraordinary’ skeletons had always been looked at somewhat from a Guinness World Records perspective. But we quickly realized that they could tell us a lot about the state of a group, its organization and the way individuals took care of each other. “It was still necessary to begin by defining the notion of “handicap”.
Today, international bodies including the World Health Organization (WHO) consider it above all as a “impediment” “, a “deficiency that causes incapacity “But for archaeologists, it is difficult to apply this concept to all eras. “A Neolithic farmer was not hindered in the same way as an ancient Greek athlete or a medieval Cistercian monk. And because this notion of hindrance evolves over the centuries and millennia, we have had to continually adopt new points of view. “
The oldest traces of disability observed in human history date back about half a million years. In the Sima de los Huesos chasm in southern Spain, there lay about thirty pre-Neanderthal individuals, including a man of about 45 years old who suffered from Neanderthal syndrome.[…]
- sciencesetavenir.fr
