A 4000 year old Egyptian skull reveals how brain cancer was treated then

A 4000-year-old skull of an Egyptian that has been stored at the University of Cambridge for many years now had some unnoticeable cut marks. But they were not noticed until very recently which has suddenly given a new direction of thought to medical science. A related study published in the Frontiers in Medicine has said that these marks can be an indication that cancer existed in ancient times and was treated in this way then.

Thus it also indicates that the Egyptians were both sophisticated and advanced in the field of medicine even 4000 years ago. According to Dr. Camaros from the University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, “This research has found a clear milestone in the history of medicine. More than 4,000 years ago they were trying to medically manage what we nowadays call cancer."

However, even now the scientists are not sure whether the cuts were made for treating cancer or a part of the ancient system of investigating post-mortem. Now the question arises whether cancer was a known disease in those days or not.

The study led by Dr. Camaros and the team made investigations on two ancient skulls with the help of high-resolution 3D microscopy to find out how the cancer cells ate particular sections of the bone. While the first skull belonged to a male in the age of around 30 to 35 years the second skull was that of a woman who had multiple healed fractures in her brain as well as a large hole probably caused due to the tumour removal.

This woman was 50 plus when she died.

Cancer has been prevalent since ancient times

Although popular belief is that cancer has increased in the last few decades due to lifestyle changes, it has never been exclusively a phenomenon of these last two centuries. According to reports, the oldest known proof of cancer for the first time was discovered in a type of ancient human species called Homo ergaster around 1.7 million years ago.

This ancient human suffered from toe bone cancer. Even a study conducted two decades ago has found that cancer cases in ancient German and Egyptian populations were not much lower than today.

The study found out that five ancient Egyptians who belonged to the period between 3200 and 500 BC had died of cancer.