Oldest Evidence Of Breast Cancer Seen In Ancient Egyptian Skeleton
Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities
Archaeologists say they may have found the world’s oldest case of breast cancer in a skeleton unearthed recently in Egypt — a reminder that cancer is not just a modern disease.
The skeleton, believed to be that of an adult woman, was unearthed by Spanish researchers working at the Qubbet el-Hawa archaeological site west of Aswan, Egypt.
The bones date back 4,200 years and bear signs of “the typical destructive damages provoked by the extension of a breast cancer as a metastasis in the bones,” according to a written statement issued by Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities.
Archaeologists discover 4,200-year-old skeleton, which shows signs of breast cancer.
Who was this unfortunate woman? Evidence suggests she was an aristocrat who lived on the Nile River island of Elephantine during Egypt’s 6th Dynasty.
This isn’t the first time researchers have found evidence of cancer in ancient times. Last March, archaeologists discovered:
a 3,000-year-old skeleton with metastatic cancer in a tomb in modern Sudan. And last October, a new MRI analysis of a Siberian mummy showed the “ice princess” likely suffered from breast cancer 2,500 years ago—and used medical marijuana to cope with the disease. THE HISTORY OF CANNABIS !!!!!
Preview Ancient Egyptian Mummy Fingerprint Discovered
The Science
As you might imagine, the science is more complex, and does not tell a simple or clean story.
Paleopathology is the study of ancient remains looking for evidence of disease, especially the cause of death. Most ancient remains are bones, and so pathological examination is limited to this tissue. However, some cultures (most famously the ancient Egyptians) practiced mummification, which preserve soft tissue, given us a potential window into ancient epidemiology.
What is uncontroversial is that ancient mummies rarely show signs of cancer. A 2010 review (the one that primarily sparked the “cancer is manmade” meme) did conclude that cancer is rare in mummies, but was much more conservative in its conclusions than the headlines:
A striking rarity of malignancies in ancient physical remains might indicate that cancer was rare in antiquity, and so poses questions about the role of carcinogenic environmental factors in modern societies. Although the rarity of cancer in antiquity remains undisputed, the first published histological diagnosis of cancer in an Egyptian mummy demonstrates that new evidence is still forthcoming.
Notice the two important caveats – the rarity of evidence for ancient cancer “might” indicate that cancer itself was rare, and the evidence itself is incomplete. Let’s tackle the second question first.
Since the publication of this review there has been more evidence. In 2011 a case of prostate cancer in an ancient mummy was published. A 2012 review of soft tissue tumors found 4 cases of malignancy and 14 cases of benign tumors. A 2014 study presents three cases of metastatic bone cancer in ancient Roman remains.
These are still not a lot of cases, but the number is growing significantly as more study is done. At present we have to conclude that the observation that ancient tumors are rare is preliminary.
Also keep in mind that negative statements, the conclusion that something is absent, are inherently problematic. They are only as good as the sensitivity of the techniques used and the thoroughness of the search. Hunting for the often subtle signs of cancer in mummified or skeletal remains is difficult and so the rarity may be partly an artifact of this difficulty.
However, even if we accept the current evidence that tumors were indeed rare in ancient populations, that does not lead directly to the conclusion that cancer is a product of modern life. As one researcher put it:
The rarity of tumors in mummies is a debated problem; short life span of past populations, scarcity of mummified remains arrived to us in comparison. . . . with skeletal remains and technical difficulties to detect neoplastic lesions in ancient tissues seem to be the main reasons of the rarity of findings. It is important to pay maximum attention to any little sign of neoplastic lesion in ancient human remains, in order to increase our limited knowledge about the type of tumours and relative incidence afflicting our ancestors.
It is possible we are just having a hard time detecting the tumors, but the short life expectancy of the ancient Egyptians is also likely a huge factor. Those who survived childhood in ancient Egypt had a life expectancy of 30 years old for women and 34 years for men, with few living past 40. Given this fact, the dearth of malignancy hardly seems like a mystery.
Conclusion
The scientific questions here are fascinating. What were disease rates in ancient populations, what evidence do we have, and how good is that evidence?
It is certainly possible that modern life does produce environmental factors that increase cancer risk. Smoking is a well established risk factor. Diets and sedentary lifestyle may also contribute.
That does not make cancer a modern or man-made disease, however. Some have oversimplified the meme even further, claiming there was no cancer before modern times. This is clearly false, as the cases referenced above indicate.
I have no reason not to at least provisionally accept the researchers’ conclusions that the relative rarity of cancer in mummies and other ancient remains is partly an artifact of the evidence, and partly due to the relatively short life expectancies of those populations.
This will not stop the “cancer is man-made” meme from continuing to crop up in social media. The narrative will live on.
A greater understanding of its origins could lead to treatments for the disease, tumours were rare until recent times when pollution and poor diet became issues, the review of mummies, fossils and classical literature found.
Michael Zimmerman, a visiting professor at Manchester University, said: ‘In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases.
‘The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialisation.’
To trace cancer’s roots, Professor Zimmerman and colleague Rosalie David analysed possible references to the disease in classical literature and scrutinised signs in the fossil record and in mummified bodies.
Despite slivers of tissue from hundreds of Egyptian mummies being rehydrated and placed under the microscope, only one case of cancer has been confirmed.
This is despite experiments showing that tumours should be even better preserved by mummification than healthy tissues.
Dismissing the argument that the ancient Egyptians didn’t live long enough to develop cancer, the researchers pointed out that other age-related disease such as hardening of the arteries and brittle bones died occur.
Fossil evidence of cancer is also sparse, with scientific literature providing a few dozen, mostly disputed, examples in animal fossil, the journal Nature Reviews Cancer reports.
Even the study of thousands of Neanderthal bones has provided only one example of a possible cancer.
Evidence of cancer in ancient Egyptian texts is also ‘tenuous’ with cancer-like problems more likely to have been caused by leprosy or even varicose veins.
The ancient Greeks were probably the first to define cancer as a specific disease and to distinguish between benign and malignant tumours.
But Manchester professors said it was unclear if this signalled a real rise in the disease, or just a greater medical knowledge.
The 17th century provides the first descriptions of operations for breast and other cancers.
And the first reports in scientific literature of distinctive tumours only occurred in the past 200 years or so, including scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps in 1775 and nasal cancer in snuff users in 1761.
Professor David, who presented the findings to Professor Mike Richards, the UK’s cancer tsar and other oncologists at a conference earlier this year, said: ‘In industrialised societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare.
‘There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.
‘The important thing about our study is that it gives a historical perspective to this disease. We can make very clear statements on the cancer rates in societies because we have a full overview. We have looked at millennia, not one hundred years, and have masses of data.
‘Yet again extensive ancient Egyptian data, along with other data from across the millennia, has given modern society a clear message – cancer is man-made and something that we can and should address.
Dr Rachel Thompson, of World Cancer Research Fund, said: ‘This research makes for very interesting reading.
‘About one in three people in the UK will get cancer so it is fairly commonplace in the modern world.
Scientists now say a healthy diet, regular physical activity and maintaining a healthy weight can prevent about a third of the most common cancers so perhaps our ancestors’ lifestyle reduced their risk from cancer.
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The American Cancer Society estimates cancer will kill nearly 600,000 people in the united states this year and more 1.6 million will be diagnosed with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Anthropologists found evidence cancer dates back to the ancient Egyptians — 3,000 years before Christ. Fossilized bone tumors have been found in human mummies. An ancient Egyptian textbook on trauma surgery — the Edwin Smith Papyrus — describes eight cases of tumors or ulcers of the breast that were removed by cauterization with a tool called the fire drill. The writing about the disease says “there is no treatment.”
Nobody really knew what cancer is because it wasn’t until the start of cell biology. That people began to understand the nature of how these cells behave how they multiply in the 20th century that we still struggle with today.
Why don’t we have a cure yet?
The Jackson Laboratory, a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, answers that question this way. Cancer cells, even within the same tumor can be quite different. And even targeted therapy is highly unlikely to eliminate all cancer cells by itself.
Further, the cancer you find today may differ from the one you treat in the weeks and months to come.
–SHARON CROWLEY
UNWRAPPING THE MUMMY – SECRETS OF THE PHARAOHS – Discovery/History/Ancient Egypt (documentary) https://www.dailymotion.com/
Is cancer genetic? Is cancer a modern disease? In this video Salima Ikram, professor of Egyptology at The American University in Cairo, explores the existence of cancer in ancient Egypt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Pakistani-born Egyptologist and archaeologist, author, and professor Salima Ikram is considered one of today’s leading experts on animal mummies, and is the founder and co-director of the Animal Mummy Project at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
In this recent video interview for the AUC Press YouTube channel, the Cairo-based specialist describes how she first came under the spell of the ancient Egyptians, tells of her work on more than a dozen ongoing projects, and reflects on the use of advanced technologies in the field of Egyptology.
The forty-nine year-old scholar studied Egyptology and archaeology at Bryn Mawr College, in Pennsylvania, earning an A.B. in classical and Near Eastern archaeology and history. She continued her studies at the University of Cambridge, earning her MPhil and PhD in Egyptology and museum studies. While working for her PhD she also trained in fauna analysis.
Her authoritative works include “Divine Creatures: Animal Mummies in Ancient Egypt” (AUC Press, 2005), “The Mummy in Ancient Egypt,” “The Tomb in Ancient Egypt: Royal and Private Sepulchres from the Early Dynastic Period to the Romans” (AUC Press, 2008), “Death and Burial in Ancient Egypt,” and “Ancient Egypt: An Introduction” (AUC Press, 2011). Ikram has also written a line of children’s books and published numerous articles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
Since 2014 Jennifer’s passion for portrait sculpting has led her twice to the U.S. to study forensic facial reconstruction sculpting at the Forensic Anthropology Centre at Texas State University with leading expert in this field, Karen T.Taylor.
Drawing on these highly specialized skills, she recently created a forensic facial reconstruction sculpture of an ancient Egyptian mummy for the University of Melbourne which is permanently on display at the University’s Anatomy Museum.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. https://www.
