Studying past cancers has implications for modern medicine. Seeing how cancer affected a pre-industrial society might help future researchers quantify how cancer-causing products affected human health.

Researchers stress that not all cancer is caused by industrial pollutants. Paleopathology combined with modern medicine could help quantify the extent that today's pollutants increase or decrease your risk of cancer.

Past studies of cancer rates in pre-industrial people relied on visual assessments of skeletal remains. But the majority of cancers start in soft tissues, and only some spread to the bones, which means that looking at bones is not the whole story...