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Camino del Molino burial site. Credit: S. Díaz-Navarro
Nearly 5,000 years ago, respiratory infections, possibly including tuberculosis, were ravaging the children buried at Camino del Molino (CMOL), Spain. The massive circular burial cave carved into rock is Europe's largest Copper Age mass burial, containing over 1,300 individuals, and has been the subject of years of excavation and analysis.
Now, a new study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology reveals just how widespread these diseases were and how they left their mark on their bones.
Dated to the 3rd millennium BC, the burial site was repeatedly used for over 700 years, resulting in a mass of bones, including men, women, and children. Such prehistoric communal graves rarely preserve intact skeletons, let alone non-adult remains, as bones are often reshuffled over centuries, poorly preserved, or completely absent.
However, at CMOL, researchers recovered 48 intact child and adolescent skeletons, providing a rare opportunity to examine skeletal changes associated with respiratory diseases and their impact on childhood health and survival.
Disease etched in bones
Because so many complete child skeletons survived, the team could look for patterns across whole bodies rather than isolated bones. Of the 48 individuals investigated, 92% had at least one bone change associated with disease. Of those, around 67% showed signs of both porous bones, mainly in the skull and leg bones, and infection-related changes associated with respiratory diseases.
"The pattern we see probably reflects a broader burden of recurrent or prolonged respiratory disease rather than a single pathogen," explained Dr. Sonia Díaz-Navarro, lead author from the University of Burgos.
While similar bone lesions have been suggested to also occur during early childhood growth spurts, the researchers argue that these lesions occur far too often, together with other signs of respiratory infection, across all examined age groups, including teenagers, to be explained solely by growth-related processes.
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