Posted on 12/11/2002 10:32:02 AM PST by thesharkboy
LONDON (Reuters) - British scientists have found the remains of a man who died of tuberculosis more than 2,200 years ago, shattering theories the deadly disease was brought to England by the conquering armies of ancient Rome.
The Iron Age skeleton was found in a pit in the tiny village of Tarrant Hinton in southwest England.
His damaged spine led scientists to suspect he was a tuberculosis victim and DNA tests confirmed it.
Carbon dating shows he lived between 400 and 230 BC, long before Julius Caesar launched Rome's first tentative invasion of Britain in 55 BC.
"It's tremendously important," said Simon Mays, a human skeletal biologist working for English Heritage.
"It tells us that TB wasn't brought here by the Romans," he told Reuters. "Presumably it was imported via trading contacts with the continent during the prehistoric period."
'TB man' was found during an excavation more than 20 years ago and has lived quietly in a museum in the sleepy village of Wimborne, near his burial site, ever since.
Should have read further, and more carefully.
Oh, well; tomorrow I have an interview for enlistment into the Captain Obvious Corps.
Gender activists push to bar anthropologists from identifying human remains as ‘male’ or ‘female’
As soon as ancient human remains are excavated, archaeologists begin the work of determining a number of traits about the individual, including age, race and gender.
But a new school of thought within archaeology is pushing scientists to think twice about assigning gender to ancient human remains.
It is possible to determine whether a skeleton is from a biological male or female using objective observations based on the size and shape of the bones. Criminal forensic detectives, for example, do it frequently in their line of work.
But gender activists argue scientists cannot know how an ancient individual identified themselves.
“You might know the argument that the archaeologists who find your bones one day will assign you the same gender as you had at birth, so regardless of whether you transition, you can’t escape your assigned sex,” tweeted Canadian Master’s degree candidate Emma Palladino last week.
There was one comment below the article:
I kind of agree. You can't normally tell if a person was mentally ill by their bone structure.
:-)
LOL
Because Tuberculosis has DNA.
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