Cut marks on a 4000-year-old skull suggest ancient Egyptian doctors tried to treat a man with nasopharyngeal cancer
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| The skull of an ancient Egyptian man with a round lesion caused by a tumor near the top (Credit: Tondini, Isidro, Camarós, 2024) |
Tiny etchings on a 4000-year-old skull suggest that the ancient Egyptians may have been the first people to try to treat cancer.
“Ancient Egyptian medicine was very advanced,” says Edgard Camarós at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. “They were able to deal with many conditions, including traumatisms and infections, and treat oral health.”
Camarós and his colleagues studied two skulls held at the University of Cambridge’s Duckworth Laboratory collection. One skull belonged to a woman at least 50 years old who lived in Egypt between 663 and 343 BC. The other one is dated between 2687 and 2345 BC and belonged to a man between 30 and 35 years old.
When the researchers viewed the specimens under the microscope, they saw that both skulls had big lesions that suggested the presence of cancerous tumours that degraded the bone.
The female probably had a type of bone cancer called osteosarcoma, says Camarós, and also had a couple of healed lesions that seem to be from traumatic injuries, perhaps from a sharp weapon at close range. These signs suggest that the ancient Egyptians may have been quite adept at treating traumatic or violent wounds.
The male probably had nasopharyngeal cancer, says Camarós, which begins in the tissues of the top of the throat. Around 30 smaller lesions around the skull indicate that the cancer had metastasised.
“We were looking at the bones with the microscope and suddenly some cut marks appear in relation to those tumours,” says Camarós. These small incisions around the lesions hint that Egyptian doctors at the time tried to treat the cancer surgically or may have conducted exploratory operations after the person had died.
Although the male seems to have died due to cancer, this is the earliest known evidence of an attempt to treat it, says Camarós. “It is a milestone in the history of medicine.”
“They didn’t have a word for cancer, but they did for swelling and tumour,” says Camarós. “But the root of how we successfully treat cancer nowadays is there, 4000 years ago.”
“It is likely that the therapeutic approach targeted the signs and symptoms associated with visible external lesions, without necessarily recognising its underlying disease,” says Carina Marques at the University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley. “The modern concept of cancer emerged only in a very recent period of our history. It is unlikely that an ancient Egyptian recognised cancers from other diseases with similar presentation.”
Journal reference:
Frontiers in Medicine DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2024.1371645
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