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How A Pregnant Woman's Love Of Dogs Led To Death By Parasite In Ancient Greece

This article is more than 8 years old.

Hidden within an ancient bronze water jug exhibited at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki in Greece are the cremated remains of three elite individuals.  Anthropologists examining the fragments have come to a startling conclusion about cause of death: the pregnant woman may have died when a parasitic cyst ruptured, killing her and her baby.

While this may sound like something out of a forensic novel, the dangers of echinococcosis – a parasitic disease of tapeworms – are real, both in the ancient world and today. This disease, also called hydatidosis, can result from contact with an infected domesticated animal or from consuming contaminated food or drink.

Echinococcosis has a few different forms, but the most common is caused by the tapeworm E. granulosus.  In this form, dogs and sheep are the main hosts, and the tapeworm produces fluid-filled cysts.  Those cysts can have fertile layers that form additional tapeworms. Some people affected by echinococcosis may have no symptoms, but others may have pain and swelling in the affected organ in which the parasite is living.

Cysts are normally soft tissue in nature, but sometimes they can calcify or mineralize, as often happens in cystic echinococcosis/hydatidosis. This means that bioarchaeologists can potentially find the remains of hydatid cysts in ancient bones and diagnose a long-dead person with this disease.

Writing this month in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, Theodore Antikas and Laura Wynn-Antikas, of the Anthropological Research Team , Aristotle University, report their discovery of a hydatid cyst among the cremated remains of an elite Macedonian woman who died in the 3rd century BC and was buried in a cemetery at Pydna.

Based on the size and condition of the burned bone fragments, Antikas and Wynn-Antikas noted that three people were present in the urn: a young adult male, a young adult female, and a fetus of about 5 to 6 lunar months.  The urn itself had initially held just the man, who may have died as early as the 5th century BC, and whose remains were reinterred in the urn in the 3rd century BC after a neck and handles were added to it.

The researchers also found among the remains a calcified hydatid cyst, noting that “its subdivision into several chambers is typical of Echinococcus granulosus” and that “the large hole seen on its external wall suggests that the cyst may have partially erupted at the time of death.”

But whom did the cyst belong to?  The size of the cyst is so large that it would have to have been growing for at least a year; this excludes the fetus. Because the two adult skeletons were cremated at different times and in different ways, the appearance of the cyst means it is almost certainly associated with the woman.

If a hydatid cyst erupts, it can cause life-threatening symptoms such as labored breathing, high fever, and anaphylactic shock. Being pregnant, this ancient Macedonian woman may have been at increased risk for anaphylactic shock owing to a decreased immunological response, the authors note. A ruptured cyst could have been deadly, causing the demise of the elite woman and her baby.

The ancient Greeks did know about echinococcosis, which was first described by Hippocrates in the 5th century, but the disease remained a major health issue in Greece even into the 20th century, when the Ministry of Health put forward guidelines for preventing transmission of the disease from dogs and other domesticated animals.

But the Macedonians cherished their dogs.  Artifacts like vases and frescoes depict scenes that prominently feature dogs in hunting and household settings. And within this cremation urn were gold earrings decorated with a now-extinct dog breed called a molossus, related to today’s mastiffs.

The pregnant woman’s jewelry, coupled with the hydatid cyst, leads Antikas and Wynn-Antikas to conclude that there is indirect evidence that “it was her love of Canis familiaris that led her to an early death.”

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