A massive 5,000-year-old grave from the Copper Age has sparked archaeological excavations and studies for years, providing a rare opportunity to study ancient disease.
At Camino del Molino (CMOL) in Spain, over 1,300 individuals were laid to rest, 5,000 years ago, because respiratory disease had become widespread, killing a significant number of individuals, who had been laid to rest in this circular gravesite carved into rock. It is Europe’s largest Copper Age mass burial.
A new study published in the International Journal of Paleopathology used the Camino del Molino site as the source of their research, hypothesizing that the co-occurrence of porous skeletal lesions and respiratory infection-related changes influenced non-adult morbidity in prehistoric communities. Or, children.
The study overall calls for a holistic, population-level approach when conducting paleopathological research into age-related disease expression.
Studying disease expression in non-adults
As study authors described, Camino del Molino, in Caravaca de la Cruz, is the most significant due to its size as a Copper Age collective burial in Europe. So this time in history represents a transitional period marked by increasing social complexity, demographic growth, and agricultural intensification, larger fortified settlements, and diverse funerary traditions. So the prehistoric peoples of Iberia were expanding, developing societies, customs, and traditions.
Analyses of this circular grave indicate two contiguous burial phases over the course of the 3rd millennium. They analyzed 1348 individuals, split up their age groups and gender from bones as well as intact skeletons, as Phys reported, which was rare to find when working with samples this ancient. They were able to examine many complete child skeletons.
Of the 48 children they examined, 92% exhibited at least one bone change associated with disease. Out of those, 67% had porous bones, the key for these paleopathology researchers, in the skull and legs, and infection-related changes with respiratory diseases. Given the evidence, even the periods of burial, these researchers identified patterns that suggest prolonged respiratory disease, rather than a single pathogen, as per Phys.
You gotta get really specific in paleopathology–the takeaway
The youngest specimens exhibited the most changes, and at ages when they would have been the most susceptible to diseases. And interestingly, these children, because they had developed similarly, revealed how they might have lived. They lived in close quarters, shared activities, as they were exposed to the same pathogens that might have been released through contact with animals, food, or toxins related to production.
Some of these individuals had undergone skull surgery 5,000 years ago. “Individuals reaching late adolescence,” study authors wrote, “may represent those who successfully endured earlier periods of heightened biological stress, resulting in a lower burden of active lesions at the time of death.” So the study represents a focused area of research in studying how disease expressed itself in non-adults in Copper Age Iberia.
“This study underscores the complexity of interpreting porous and respiratory infection-related skeletal changes and demonstrates the necessity of holistic, population-level approaches in palaeopathology. By integrating lesion frequency, anatomical distribution, co-occurrence patterns, and age-specific mortality data, the CMOL assemblage provides a rare opportunity to explore childhood morbidity beyond isolated diagnoses and single-lesion frameworks.”