In the disease-scarred bones of a Homo erectus from Turkey, scientists have found evidence of a peril that human ancestors encountered in their migrations out of Africa: tuberculosis.

Paleontologists examining small lesions etched inside the 500,000-year-old skull said this was the earliest known sign of a form of tuberculosis that attacks the meninges, the membranes surrounding the brain. Previously, the earliest physical traces of TB were only a few thousand years old, in mummies from Egypt and pre-Columbian Peru.