The surprisingly ancient history of a half forgotten disease which has returned to haunt modern Britain was revealed yesterday, when archaeologists unveiled the skeleton of the earliest case of tuberculosis ever found in Britain.
The man died an agonising death between 400 and 230 BC, in an Iron Age hamlet in Dorset, three centuries before the previously recorded earliest incidences of the disease, which was believed to have arrived with the Romans.
The skeleton was excavated by local amateur archaeologists 30 years ago, in the hamlet which lay below a Roman villa at Tarrant Hinton, but its significance was only revealed by recent scientific tests and carbon dating.
The disease itself is far older, with the earliest known cases recorded around 6,000 years ago in Italy, Scandinavia, and Egypt. It has spread across the world, with cases known from China to South America, and for most of recorded history was one of the most dreaded killers, with the distinctive pal lor and flushed cheeks of its victims a frequent motif in folklore and literature.
In the west it was believed to have been wiped out by modern drugs since the second world war, but it is now on the increase again, and has been declared a global emergency by the World Health Organisation. There were 6,838 cases reported in England and Wales last year.
Whoever the Dorset man was, he was well cared for by his community. He lived for between 30 and 40 years, not far off a normal lifespan, but for years before his death he would have been unable to work, and would have been pitifully weak and thin, and bent almost in two by crumbling vertebrae in his spine.
The reassessment of his skeleton was carried out by Simon Mays, of English Heritage, and Michael Taylor, of Imperial College London.
Although they failed to recover any human DNA from the badly degraded bones, Dr Taylor did recover the DNA of the tuberculosis itself. His tests were not conclusive, but he believes the man suffered from the human rather than bovine strain of the disease.
Scientists at Durham University will now test two of the man's teeth, and attempt to isolate isotopes of oxygen and strontium, which could reveal where he grew up, and whether he was an immigrant or local.
The area is known to have had extensive trading links with the continent. His hamlet was only a few miles from Poole harbour, where recent archaeology has proved that the earliest port structures were centuries older than the Romans' constructions.
