Is cancer as prevalent as it was prehistorically?

[pinball1970]

By comparison, do you think caveman 'Bob' would have lived with the same chances of contracting cancer as modern day 'Bob'?

I read this somewhere and found this link about evidence regarding ancient species and tumours

http://www.nature.com/news/1998/031020/full/news031020-2.html

Rothschild, B. M. , Tanke, D. H. , Helbling, M. II & Martin, L.D. . Epidemiologic study of tumors in dinosaurs. Naturwissenschaften, published online, doi:10.1007/s00114-003-0473-9 (2003).

Also a little closer to home, I remember this from studying Art history in the 80s

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4839543/

Tumours /malignancies would not have been diagnosed correctly until fairly recently or as above retrospectively.

Also as has been pointed out peoples not so long ago did not live long enough to develop what is essentially a disease of the aged.

Life expectancy 2000 years ago would have been around 30 possibly?

 

[Drakkith]

Tumours /malignancies would not have been diagnosed correctly until fairly recently or as above retrospectively.

Especially with the various taboos that were in place until relatively recently against opening up corpses and digging around in them to figure out what killed them.

Life expectancy 2000 years ago would have been around 30 possibly?

If you remove all those who died within their first decade of life, the life expectancy rises to 50-60 I believe. I don't have a citation for this at the moment, but I know I've read about it before.

 

[jim mcnamara]

Humans have a type 1 survivorship curve - meaning that infant mortality (generally defined as age 5 or less) decreases the average age at death, also known as life expectancy, drastically. This curve is not applicable in times of major plagues, like the bubonic plague in Europe in the 1300's, or smallpox in Mesoamerica in the wake of the Spanish conquest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_curve