More Than Just Mad Cows: Exploring Human‐Animal Relationships through Animal Paleopathology

Abstract

From the earliest hunters, through the advent of domestication to the most recent outbreak of swine flu, animals and humans have had a long and complex relationship. Anthropology and archaeology (more specifically the disciplines of zooarchaeology and paleopathology) provide a key temporal framework for the exploration and understanding of this relationship and the wide range of questions that are encompassed by it. Paleopathological studies in ancient human and nonhuman species can be broadly defined as the study of past health, disease and injury, through the analysis of calcified tissue, primarily bones and teeth. However, compared to human paleopathology, animal paleopathology has received little or no serious attention within the wider fields of archaeology and even zooarchaeology. The reasons for this are varied (and discussed in more detail below), but are principally related to the more complex, intensive taphonomic processes that animal bone assemblages often undergo compared to human remains. As we hope this brief chapter will highlight, the study of animal paleopathology has the potential to add a great deal of information to our understanding of the past. Whilst perhaps the most obvious area of study relates to the spread and management of human diseases, this is just the "tip of the iceberg".

Uncovering the Holocene roots of contemporary disease-scapes: bringing archaeology into One Health

“…Combined zooarchaeological and palaeogenomic approaches have been used to study infectious disease within animal remains [52][53][54]. Early veterinary reports and more recent palaeopathology studies of animal diseases include canine distemper, rabies, cowpox, tuberculosis and plague, to name a few [39,55].…”

Paleopathology, Entheseal Changes, and Cross-Sectional Geometry: The Zooarchaeology of Working Animals

“…Even domesticated species have not adequately changed enough through artificial selection to be optimized for human-managed work. Further, many lesions associated with working animals also have other factors such as age, sexual dimorphism, environment, and genetic predisposition that influence their expression and can be misinterpreted as signs of labour exploitation (Upex and Dobney 2012). The frequency and severity of lesions present on non-working animal populations acts as a control sample to compare with animals known to have been worked.…”

Between Human and Veterinary Medicine: The History of Animals and Surgery

“…11 Evidence of animals as surgical patients is even older. Archaeological findings reveal occasional attempts by humans to heal the fractures of domestic animals, 12 while tomb paintings in pre-Pharonic Egypt depict cows whose horns were surgically manipulated for religious reasons, to form cyclical representations of earth and heaven. 13 The Hippiatrica -a collection of manuscripts that formed the standard Byzantine text on horse health and healingborrowed from human medicine in providing instructions for the surgical treatments of wounds and fractures.…”