Oldest Tumor Ever Discovered Demonstrates Cancer's Threat Even 120,000 Years Ago

Neanderthals suffered a cancer common in modern-day humans, according to researchers who have uncovered the world’s oldest human tumor.

Found in the rib of a 120,000-year-old fossil, the discovery of the fibrous dysplasia predates previous evidence of others like it by more than 100,000 years, with previous samples dating back approximately 1,000 to 4,000 years.

The cancerous rib, excavated in present-day Croatia, is an incomplete specimen, however, thus leaving the researchers unable to comment on the overall health effects the tumor may have had on the individual who it belonged to.

Nevertheless, the discovery offers evidence that cancer, and specifically bone cancer, posed a threat long before man-made environmental pollutants were introduced, according to team member David Frayer.

“This case shows that Neanderthals, living in an unpolluted environment, were susceptible to the same kind of cancer as living humans," he said in a press release.

However, this does not mean the human ancestors weren’t exposed to toxins at all, even if they were more natural to their environment.

“They didn’t have pesticides, but they probably were sleeping in caves with burning fires,” National Geographic reported Frayer as saying. “They were probably inhaling a lot of smoke from the caves. So the air was not completely free of pollutants – but certainly, these Neanderthals weren’t smoking cigarettes.”

A likely reason the tumor is the first of its time period to be unearthed, Frayer points out in the study, is that the frequency of tumors strongly correlates with the “relatively recent expansion of the human life span,” as so many are age-dependent. And Neanderthals, researchers believe, had average life spans that, at best, were half of those of modern populations.

All of these facts, in addition to “environmental changes wrought by humans, compounded by population expansion,” have since led, Frayer points out, to an increase of “types and intensification” of pollutants that were not a part of the Neanderthal world.

For these reasons, Frayer ultimately argues, another fossil like the one in his possession is unlikely to be discovered any time soon.