Cancer has long been considered a disease of our time, but at the beginning of the 21st century, traces of it were found in ancient Egyptian mummies, Neanderthals, and even on the bones of dinosaurs and lizardmen. It seems that various kinds of tumors have accompanied multicellular life since its inception on the planet.
Disease of the Scythian king
In 2001, Russian archaeologists unearthed a Scythian burial of a man and a woman over two and a half millennia in the Tuvan "Valley of the Tsars". There were more than twenty kilograms of gold, which indicates the high social status of the buried. It took six years before specialists noticed microscopic dark spots covering almost the entire male skeleton. A careful analysis of the bones showed that these are traces of metastases - cancer cells that have torn off the primary malignant tumor and have formed secondary foci of the disease in different parts of the body. That is, this Scythian king died of some kind of oncological disease. By comparing the data obtained with modern cell samples, the scientists found that it was prostate cancer.
Tumor 1.7 million years old
Traces of malignant tumors and metastases were found in Egyptian mummies buried 2,250 years ago, South American Incas, ancient Romans and medieval Englishmen. In 2013, American paleontologists identified bone cancer on a Neanderthal rib found in the Croatian Krapina Cave. Its age is about 120 thousand years. According to scientists, the tumor arose as a result of a rare disease - fibrous dysplasia, caused by a breakdown in the ACVR1 gene. This means that cancer was hereditary, and it is likely that environmental pollution is not the main reason for the current spread of cancer, the authors of the study note. The same point of view is shared by British and African scientists who discovered in 2016 in the Swartkrans Cave (South Africa) traces of the most ancient human cancer at the moment - osteosarcoma. It struck the foot and toes of Australopithecus sediba, one of the alleged ancestors of Homo sapiens, who lived about 1.7 million years ago. It is not known what caused the death of this creature, but the bone tumor most likely prevented it from moving normally.
The leg bone of Australopithecus sediba, affected by osteosarcoma.
Mesozoic diseases
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American paleontologists, who examined more than ten thousand dinosaur vertebrae from seven hundred museum specimens over several years, found signs of cancer in almost a hundred duck-billed dinosaurs - hadrosaurs that lived in the Cretaceous period, about 70 million years ago. Traces of a malignant tumor were noticed on the bones of the tortoise Pappochelys rosinae, which lived 240 million years ago. Her skeleton was recovered from early Triassic deposits in southern Germany. The scan showed that she suffered from osteosarcoma, which arose from the "riot" of adult stem cells in the periosteum. These tumors most often affect young people today - it is one of the most common types of bone cancer in humans and pets.
The bone of a turtle that suffered from cancer 240 million years ago.
The oldest cancer to date was diagnosed by paleontologists from the University of Washington in Seattle (USA). Trying to understand how mammals got teeth, they examined the skulls of gorgonops - saber-toothed beast-lizards that lived 255 million years ago, at the very end of the Paleozoic era. To find out how the teeth of the gorgonops were attached to the skull, the researchers cut one of the jaws into small pieces and saw unusual bony bubbles of irregular shape on the roots of the saber-toothed fangs of the ancient predator. These were odontomas - benign tumors of the dental tissue. Such formations often appear in the gums and on the teeth of a person, usually painless, they do not interfere with the normal functioning of the jaw. However, their presence indicates the possibility of malignant manifestations in the future. It is not excludedthat various kinds of tumors have accompanied multicellular life in fact from the moment of its appearance on the planet, the authors of the article conclude.
Alfiya Enikeeva