Found in Atapuerca a case of rickets and scurvy 5.000 years ago

Cristina G. Pedraz/DICYT Members of the Research Team of Atapuerca (EIA) and of the University of Burgos have just published in the magazine Journal of Anthropological Sciences the best documented case of rickets and scurvy in Prehistory. The discovery has been made based on a child-like skeleton in an excellent state of preservation located in the site of El Portalón de Cueva Mayor two seasons ago. The researchers have applied the Carbon-14 dating method and have estimated that the remains belong to a boy or a girl who lived from 5,020 to 5,030 years ago.

As José Miguel Carretero, director of Human Evolution Laboratory of the University of Burgos, has explained to DiCYT, the adoption of agriculture and of stockbreeding during Neolithic “had positive as well as negative effects for human health”. Among the negative effects, there are the diseases transmitted to mankind by domestic animals and the nutritional deficiencies caused by an impoverished diet based on little variety of food. “It is precisely during a person’s growth that food deficiencies and diseases are more serious , and, with those life conditions, it is difficult to imagine that there were not diseases related to the lack of essential vitamins like rickets and scurvy”, he details.

Nevertheless, this line of research has recently been studied by the international science community and only two references about these kinds of illnesses in Prehistory are known: works from Serbia and England. In addition, the good state of preservation of the skeleton found in El Portalón has allowed EIA members María Castilla, Ana Gracia, Juan Luis Arsuaga and Carretero to analyze the teeth as well as the skull bones, the face, the arms and the legs, documenting the case in depth.

The Electron Microscopy, Computerized Axial Tomography (TAC) techniques and the anthropologic analysis have revealed that the child-like person “seems to have rickets as well as scurvy, at least during different periods of one’s short life, since it has already been determined that one’s death occurred between 6.5 and 7 years of age”. Likewise, the marks left by these illnesses in the child’s teeth (known as hypoplasia lines), in one’s skull (in the form of anomalous porosity) and in one’s long bones (pronounced curvature and Harris lines) have allowed the researchers to confirm that “a first crisis happened between one year and a half and three years, specifically the critical period in which children are weaned and begin consuming another kind of food besides maternal milk”.

In particular, the abnormal curvature of arms and legs bones could be related to rickets when the child was still crawling or learning to walk. Carretero reminds that rickets is an illness caused by the lack of vitamin D, which does not allow the bones to mineralize correctly, becoming less resistant and even curving and folding in a pronounced way because of weight.

“Maternal milk contains little Vitamin D, besides it also depends on the mother’s health state. In addition, a diet based on cereals may be counter-productive, since they inhibit iron and calcium absorption. To top it all, a genetic analysis recently published about adult bones of El Portalón has revealed, to our surprise, that these Neolithic shepherds still lacked the genetic mutation that allows us nowadays, mainly European populations, to correctly digest milk lactose. This would have affected the mother’s as well as the boy’s or girl’s health in a negative way, causing constant diarrhea and intestinal disorders”, he assures.

Second crisis between 4 and 5 years

The researchers have confirmed that the child had a second crisis between the ages of 4 and 5, which cannot be related to the weaning and whose bone marks could be related to the lack of another essential vitamin, like Vitamin C or ascorbic acid. “The lack of this vitamin causes scurvy, which also affects collagen formation, and, consequently, bone and blood vessel walls’ resistance. To a monotonous diet and lactose intolerance, you would have to add other factors like the lack of food rich in Vitamin C like fruits and other vegetables, that cooking the food and storing it incorrectly destroys a lot of this vitamin or that the lack of hygiene favors infections and Vitamin C is essential to fight them”.

In this way, diarrheas and other intestinal disorders would be constant in the child, what means nutritional deficiencies, and, finally, a scurvy crisis. “We will never know exactly what caused the child’s death just two years later, but the clues offered by the bones suggest that one’s weakness and malnutrition general state could have been an open door for the entrance of dangerous infections and, maybe, one of them has eventually put an end to his life”, Carretero points out.

	Bibliography
	Castilla, M., Carretero, J.M., Gracia, A., y Arsuaga, J.L. (2014). “Evidence of Rickets and/or Scurvy in a Complete Chalcolithic Child Skeleton from the El Portalón Site (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain)”. Journal of Anthropological Sciences. 92, 257-271. doi: 10.4436/JASS.92005