A female skeleton thought to be 2000 years old shows signs of injury during childbirth, with damage to the pubic symphysis, a joint running down the midline of the pelvis.
The New scientist reports on it: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328465.200-birth-trauma-etched-in-ancient-female-pelvis.html
Early last year Jeremy DeSilva at Boston University used estimates of neonatal hominin body mass to suggest that childbirth first became difficult around 4 million years ago. "It is a paper like this that will make me look at all of the casts I have of these pelvises to see if there are [signs of childbirth trauma]," he says. Female pelvises from the fossil record include those of the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) and one from a near-complete 2-million-year-old skeleton of Australopithecus sediba.
