Ben Daitz writes:

The Horus Group, named after the Egyptian god of healing, is an international team of cardiologists, archaeologists and radiologists who have studied more than 200 mummies in Egypt, Peru, the Aleutian Islands and Italy with computer tomography (CT) scans and genetic analyses. They wanted to see if atherosclerosis, one of the leading causes of death in the world, is a disease of modernity, our high stress, cholesterol-laden lifestyle, or if it had been there all along. Are we dealing with a mere century of clogged arteries – or can we find the same pathology in the arteries of mummies that are 5,000 years old?

Turns out, many mummies died with heart disease. The Horus Group found that, on CT scans, almost 38 per cent of the mummies had the primary pathological evidence of atherosclerosis, deposits of calcium lining their aortas, and other major arteries.

To be mummified, you had to be rich, powerful, a priest, a relative of the pharaoh; the Egyptian elite were not foragers like the Tsimane. They lived a relatively lavish, sedentary lifestyle and, according to hieroglyphic papyri, ate a lot of meat and suffered from cardiac symptoms. In 2013, the results of the Horus study were published in the preeminent medical journal The Lancet and major cardiovascular journals.

In 2022, I was invited to join an extraordinary Zoom meeting by the anthropologist Hillard (Hilly) Kaplan, co-director of the Tsimane Health and Life History Project, and my friend of many years. I’m a physician, and in 2002, I had joined Kaplan and a small group of young anthropologists and Bolivian physicians in a project that would ultimately conduct one of the most logistically complex and comprehensive health assessments of any group of people in the world, a rare model of cooperative scientific effort across multiple disciplines and cultures.

Horus Group scientists who had found heart disease in mummies would join with the Tsimane Project and analyse CT scans of the hearts of the Tsimane, an Indigenous tribe of about 17,000 people living in the lowland Bolivian jungle. They would find almost no heart disease. What’s more, continuing research with the Tsimane shows rates of dementia among the lowest ever observed, and they have only minimal cognitive impairment with ageing. [Continue reading…]