JMU, partner universities study ancient skeletons to understand health patterns

Studying ancient skeletons can help create specific health measures for different populations in the past, according to a recent study conducted by JMU researchers and published in the journal Science Advances.   

The project team, which included researchers from JMU, the University of Louisville, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Ohio State University, examined data from over 1,600 skeletons from medieval cemeteries in London, England. Dr. Samantha Yaussy, an assistant professor from JMU’s department of sociology and anthropology, and Dr. Kathryn Marklein from the University of Louisville are co-first authors of the study. 

Their study shows that skeletal data can help develop health indices tailored to specific historical contexts. This means we can better understand health patterns from the past and how they relate to modern populations. 

"Bioarchaeological studies like this are important because they can tell us whether the patterns of disease and death that we see in living populations also existed in the past. If patterns of health are not consistent over time, we can use skeletal data to understand why,” said Yaussy.  

Key findings: 

• The study suggests that the way men and women experienced health and disease in medieval London was different from today. 
• Unlike modern times, where women typically live longer but often have more health issues, this pattern was not seen in medieval London. 
• This could mean that cultural factors, like access to nutritious food, played a role in health differences between men and women in the past. 

Implications for today: 

• These findings help us understand how social and cultural factors have historically influenced health. 
• It shows that the longer life expectancy of women seen today is a relatively recent development, likely due to reduced cultural marginalization in the present day. 

Yaussy says that modern society can use these findings to learn more about some of the social and cultural factors that influence how men and women experience health and disease. 

“Longer female survivorship (that is, the morbidity-mortality paradox) did not appear until recently. Throughout much of history, females were culturally marginalized, which impacted their survival. This marginalization of females minimized or overwrote any biological advantages that females possess, causing a female's risk of death to be approximately the same as a male's. It is not until relatively recently in human history that the biological buffering capacity of females is observable, because they are no longer being marginalized the way they were in previous historical periods.” 

The authors, along with colleagues at the University of Milan, are conducting similar research on skeletal samples from Milan, Italy. So far, the results indicate that a tailor-made approach to studying frailty in the past is necessary to understand how health has changed in the city over the last 2,000 years.