By Bruce Bower
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 TB or not TB? That was the question created by a pair of human skeletons excavated more than a decade ago at a 9,000-year-old village submerged off Israel’s coast.
Bone damage apparently produced by some type of infection created the Shakespearean dilemma that puzzled excavation director and anthropologist Israel Hershkovitz, head of the Dan David Laboratory for the Search and Study of Modern Humans at TelAvivUniversity in Israel.
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Thanks to a genetic analysis of the skeletons directed by Helen Donoghue and Mark Spigelman, both of University College London, Hershkovitz now knows that his team unearthed the earliest known cases of human tuberculosis. A roughly 25-year–old mother had apparently passed on the bacterial infection to her 1-year–old child, after which they both died and were buried together.
Other instances of human tuberculosis that have been confirmed by ancient DNA analyses date to no more than about 5,500 years ago in Egypt and Sweden.