Evidence of rickets – a disease of the urban poor during the Industrial Revolution – has been found in the remains of a woman who lived on a Hebridean island more than 5,000 years ago.
The skeleton of the woman, who was about 25 to 30 years old, was discovered near the shoreline on Tiree, The Guardian reported.
Rickets is caused by a lack of vitamin D, which can result from a lack of sunlight and seafood.
Professor Ian Armit, of Bradford University, speculated about why a woman living in a rural, seaside setting could have got the disease.
“It might be that she had some other illness that caused her community to confine her indoors or she could have been a slave,” he said.
“It’s also possible she wore a costume that covered her body and this could have been because she held a religious role. But we will probably never know.”
A lack of seafood in her diet could have been because people at the time were concentrating on farming.
“They would have been a farming community growing mainly barley and raising cattle and sheep,” Professor Armit said.
“We don’t know why fishing stopped during the Neolithic period, but the people put their efforts into farming, which was obviously very labour intensive.
“There may have been religious reasons or cultural taboos which meant eating fish had become a last resort for them.”
Researchers noticed signs of rickets in the woman’s bones and radiocarbon dating suggested she lived sometime between 3340 and 3090BC. It is about 3,000 years older than the previous oldest know case of the disease.
The discovery was discussed at the British Science Festival in Bradford on Wednesday.
