From their writings, scientists have already established that the ancient Egyptians possessed extraordinary medical expertise. They were able to create prosthetic limbs, cure severe wounds, and place tooth fillings.
However, after examining two human skulls that were both thousands of years old, a multinational team of experts discovered “extraordinary” evidence of attempts to treat cancer.
The principal investigator of the research, Professor Edgard Camaros, is a paleopathologist from the University of Santiago de Compostela. He stated: “This discovery provides exceptional proof of how ancient Egyptian medicine might have attempted to treat or investigate cancer almost 4,000 years ago.
This is a really fresh way of looking at how we have historically understood medicine.”
The first author of the study published in Frontiers in Medicine, Tatiana Tondini, is a researcher at the University of Tubingen. She continued, “We see that although ancient Egyptians were able to deal with complex cranial fractures, cancer was still a medical knowledge frontier.”
“We wanted to learn about the role of cancer in the past, how prevalent this disease was in antiquity, and how ancient societies interacted with this pathology.”
The researchers examined two skulls from the Duckworth Collection at the University of Cambridge; one was from a woman in her 663–343 BC, and the other belonged to a man in his 30s to 35s, dated between 2687 and 2345 BC.
