Researchers at the University of California, Irvine have found strong evidence of atherosclerosis or heart disease in ancient Egyptian mummies. The new findings are based on CT scans of over 50 mummies and represent the oldest known evidence of human heart disease. The new findings will be surprising to some, since they involve pre-modern people, but really shouldn’t be. After all, the subjects studied lived long after the agrarian revolution and had carbohydrate and fat-rich diets much like eating patterns today. Based on their findings, the research team has hypothesized that atherosclerosis may be a natural human condition, but this idea is at odds with other research examining and finding little evidence of this and other chronic disease conditions in hunter-gatherer populations (people with a pre-agrarian lifestyle). Learn more about the new research at Mummy Heart Disease and studies of pre-agrarian people at the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Hunters and Gatherers.
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