Ancient Egypt and a pioneer of palaeopathology

At the start of the last century, a team of archaeologists began a race against the clock to rescue thousands of human bodies from ancient graves in modern Egypt’s Lower Nubia region. They would have been lost forever when the Lower Aswan Dam was raised in 1907, causing the Nile to back up and flood the entire valley. Sir Grafton Elliot Smith’s study of the excavated bones pioneered the discipline of palaeopathology and the methods of modern epidemiology. Trust-funded researchers at the University of Manchester and the Natural History Museum are now tracking down the bones he collected and carrying on his work.

Read the whole article on Physorg

More from Physorg