With fluctuating disease rates, innovative treatments and White House “moonshot” talk, cancer may seem like a modern scourge, but new discoveries are shedding light on how humans have confronted the disease and sought a cure as far back as Ancient Egypt.
Scientists led by paleopathologist Edgardo Camaros of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain were studying an Egyptian skull dating back about 4,600 years when they found signs of brain tumors and their treatment.
“There was an awkward silence in the room, knowing what we had just discovered,” Dr. Kamaros said.
He and the study's other authors, Tatiana Tondini of the University of Tübingen in Germany and Alberto Isidro of Sagrat Cor University Hospital in Spain, used a microscope to find incision marks around the edges of the skull surrounding dozens of lesions that previous researchers had linked to metastatic brain tumors. The shape of the incisions suggested they were made with a metal tool. The findings, reported in a study published Wednesday in the medical journal Frontiers in Medicine, suggest that ancient Egyptians used surgery to study brain tumors. If the incisions were made while the subjects were alive, they may have been attempting to treat them.
This new discovery not only expands scientific knowledge about Egyptian medicine, but also potentially pushes back the timeline of recorded attempts by humans to treat cancer by up to 1,000 years.
Cancer has plagued humans for as long as humans have existed, and it has plagued life on Earth for even longer.
“Cancer has been around for a long time,” says Dr. Kamaros. “Even the dinosaurs suffered from it.”
Paleopathologists like Dr. Kamaros study not only the evolution of disease, but also attempts to understand and treat it. For example, we know that prehistoric humans were plagued by cancers that no longer exist. Dr. Kamaros and his colleagues hope that uncovering the changing nature of cancer over millennia will reveal information that can help design treatments today.
Although cancer was probably not well understood, Egyptian medicine was more advanced than in many other countries in the ancient world. An Egyptian document called the Edwin Smith Papyrus, written about 3,600 years ago, contains what some researchers believe to be cases of cancer. The document describes a serious illness that “has no cure.”
Ancient Egyptians also performed skull surgery in a different way, and Dr. Kamaros and his team also report in the study that they found evidence of successful trauma treatment in another 2,600-year-old skull.
Casey L. Kirkpatrick, a bioarchaeologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said the new paper provides the first physical evidence that ancient Egyptians may have practiced cancer treatment.
The study also has another benefit, Dr. Kirkpatrick said, by documenting further ancient historical evidence of the disease.
“It also serves as a reminder that cancer is not a modern disease,” she says, “which may help ease the guilt of people currently suffering from cancer who worry that their lifestyle may have played a role in their onset.”
Just as cancer treatment was uncharted territory for the ancient Egyptians, modern researchers' exploration of the distant past is fraught with uncertainty. It's impossible to tell whether surgical marks on the skull indicate antemortem or postmortem treatment, researchers say. And many cancers develop in soft tissue, leaving bones unaffected. This poses a challenge for modern scientists, since only bones are usually found in the fossil record.
Despite these obstacles, Dr Kamaros said the new discovery has given scientists a fresh perspective on what to look for, and he will next search for similar evidence at ancient sites in Kenya.
“I think this is just one example,” he said.
