disability

A double burial found in southern Italy more than 60 years ago has just yielded a striking new secret: ancient DNA has confirmed a rare inherited form of dwarfism in a teenage girl who lived around 12,000 years ago, along with evidence that her close family likely helped her survive in a demanding Ice Age landscape. The research, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, is being described as the earliest confirmed genetic diagnosis in an anatomically modern human, writes a University of Vienna release. The case comes from Grotta del Romito, a limestone cave near Papasidero in Calabria, where two individuals were buried together in an embrace. New genetic analysis shows the pair were both female and closely