Pre-Columbian pearl divers may have suffered from ear damage

Enlarge / This temporal bone from a male skull unearthed at the site of a pre-Columbian village near the Gulf of Panama has bony bumps characteristic of surfer's ear. (credit: Smith-Guzman and Cooke)

Surfers, divers, and others who spend time in cold water sometimes suffer from a condition called "surfer’s ear," in which a small bony bump forms in the temporal bone, blocking part of the ear canal. Archaeologists recently found the same bony growths in the skulls of people who lived in pre-Columbian Panama up to 2,400 years ago. They suspect the skulls are the remains of expert pearl divers who spent their lives freediving for valuable items on the ocean floor.

Beneath the surface

The skulls were part of a large collection examined by archaeologists Nicole Smith-Guzman and Richard Cooke of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. They found the telltale bumps on the temporal bones of eight skulls with intact ear canals—seven men and one woman. Among the skulls that still had intact ear canals on both sides, 12.2 percent of the men and 3.3 percent of the women had surfer’s ear on at least one side. Most had mild or moderate cases, but one man had enough growth to block more than two-thirds of his ear canal, which may have been enough to cause noticeable hearing loss.

The relatively low frequency of the growths suggests a select group of mostly men who, for some reason, regularly ended up with cold water in their ear canals.