A professor at American University in Cairo says that the discovery of prostate cancer in a 2,200 year old mummy indicates that the cancer was caused by genetics and not environment.
“Living conditions in ancient times were very different; there were no pollutants or modified foods, which leads us to believe that the disease is not necessarily only linked to industrial factors,” Salima Ikram, an AUC professor who studied the mummy for two years in Portugal, reports to the Huffington Post. This is based on the major question that cancer researchers ask – genetics or environment?
This is the second oldest known case of prostate cancer; the oldest case was a 2,700 year old skeleton of a king in Russia.
