Paleopathology

Paleopathology, also spelled palaeopathology, is the study of ancient diseases and injuries in organisms through the examination of fossils, mummified tissue, skeletal remains, and analysis of coprolites.

[2][page needed] Paleopathology is an interdisciplinary science, meaning it involves knowledge from many sectors including (but not limited to) "clinical pathology, human osteology, epidemiology, social anthropology, and archaeology".

Training in anthropology and archaeology is arguably most important, because the analysis of human remains and ancient artifacts are paramount to the discovery of early disease.

Some historians and anthropologists theorize that "Johann Friederich Esper, a German naturalist...heralds the birth of paleopathology.

"[5] Although it wasn't until between the mid nineteenth century and World War I that the field of human paleopathology is generally considered to have come about.

During this period, a number of pioneering physicians and anthropologists, such as Marc Armand Ruffer, G. Elliot Smith, Frederic Wood Jones, Douglas E. Derry, and Samuel George Shattock, clarified the medical nature of ancient skeletal pathologies.

[6] This work was consolidated between the world wars with methods such as radiology, histology and serology being applied more frequently, improving diagnosis and accuracy with the introduction of statistical analysis.

New techniques in molecular biology also began to add new information to what was already known about ancient disease,[7] as it became possible to retrieve DNA from samples that were centuries or millennia old.

The basic nature of bones allows them to not degrade over time like other human remains would, making osteopathology important in studying ancient disease.

[10] In identifying pathologies, physical anthropologists rely heavily on good archaeological documentation regarding location, age of site and other environmental factors.

From there, the paleopathology researcher determines a number of key biological indicators on the specimen including age and sex.

For example, cranial deformation is evident in the skulls of the Maya, where a straight line between nose and forehead may have been preferred over an angle or slope.

The 10,000 year-old human remains discovered at the site of Nataruk in Turkana, Kenya, reportedly show extreme traumatic lesions to the head, neck, ribs, knees and hands, including embedded stone projectiles, and they may represent the earliest evidence of inter-group conflict between hunter-gatherers in the past.

The type, severity, number, timing and location of fractures are important for delineating between accidental and violent trauma and the data recovered from analysis reveal the meaning of that violence.

[16] Fractures present substantial problems for the skeletal areas located around the point of initial trauma and may leave accompanying secondary pathological evidence due to tissue death, deformity, and arthritis.

As White notes, “The rate of fracture repair depends on alignment, amount of movement at the site of fracture and the health, age, diet, and blood supply of the individual.”[13] Differentiating skeletal trauma as the result of violence compared to that caused by accidental or other causes is achieved by integrating the skeletal analysis of mechanical injury to bone with the sociocultural context.

[18] Intertwining the biological analysis with the sociocultural factors presented by not just the individual but also the larger group context has allowed bioarchaeology to identify numerous types of violence including, as The Routledge Handbook of Paleopathology notes,“warfare, ritualized combat, hand to hand fighting, raids and ransacking, massacres, torture, executions, witchcraft, captive taking, slavery, anthropophagy, intimate partner and child abuse, scalping and human sacrifice.

[23] It is believed that the cause of the Black Death was bubonic plague,[23] whose symptoms include swollen lymph nodes, fever, headache, fatigue, and muscle aches,[24] and in some cases swellings from which blood and pus seeped.

[27] The wide range of ages of the remains, from one to 45 years, led archaeologists to infer that something devastating most likely caused their deaths.

Because all ages were being buried here, archaeologists inferred that, although Thornton Abbey was adjacent to a small town, it was consumed by the plague to the extent in which a mass grave was needed.

"Molecular identification by 'suicide PCR' of Yersinia pestis in the pulp tissue of teeth" and other forms of analysis on ancient DNA has become progressively more common with modern advancements.

Then the individual can expect more widespread soft tissue changes and lastly the diseases start to affect the bones.