Most people catch the common cold at least once a year, making the seasonal sniffles a staple of the human experience. But when in Homo sapiens' history did people first start catching the common cold?
The question is difficult to answer, in part because many viruses cause colds and few of them preserve well in human remains. But it's possible that some of the earliest Homo sapiens were catching colds at least 300,000 years ago, the time the oldest archaeological evidence of our species dates to.
