New findings from researchers at South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand reveals that the cause of cancer is more complicated than just the stress of modern life.
Paleontologists found a benign tumor in a 12 or 13-year-old boy specimen that dates back almost 2 million years. They also found a malignant tumor on a little toe bone of a left foot that's 1.7 million years old.
The oldest discovered human cancer was between 780,000 and 120,000 years old. Most of the reasons that few cancers have been found in ancient specimens is that people just didn't live long enough to develop tumors.
According to National Geographic, the earliest discussion of cancer came from the Egyptian physician Imhotep, who described in his writings a "bulging at the breast" that did not respond to any known remedies.
The study says that things go wrong inside our bodies but they are unrelated to stresses brought on by society, like pollution and smoking. Million years ago, bodies form tumors or growths that may or may not have been cancerous.
In short, these conditions such as cancer have been with us for a long time and it just didn't pop out because of modernity. The incidence may have increased over time because our habits have changed, but longevity provides more opportunities for things to go wrong.
Source: Philly.com National Geographic
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