On a recent visit to the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney, Hebrew University Professor Mark Spiegelman received a surprise.
"People at the museum told me they had many crates of bones and didn't know what to do with them," said Prof. Spiegelman, a medical archaeologist who researches contagious diseases by examining ancient skeletons and mummies. An anthropologist who worked with Dr. Kathleen Kenyon, who excavated Jericho, deposited the crates there 50 years ago. Spiegelman examined the bones and realized that they were from Jericho. He quickly told the museum staffers not to throw them out. A team of Palestinian, German and Israeli researchers will now be examining them.
Kenyon, a British archaeologist, excavated the remains of Jericho in 1952. Kenyon, born to a family of Christian Bible researchers, hoped to uncover the walls of the city conquered by Joshua as the Israelites entered the promised land.
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She did in fact uncover a large wall that had collapsed, but it appeared to have fallen more than 1,000 years before when the children of Israel would have arrived in the city. At that time, there seemed to be no real community life in Jericho, the excavations found. Kenyon's findings were published and became one of the foundations of the archaeological perception of the biblical period. Some of the artifacts uncovered in the ancient city were dispersed among collections and museums around the world.
Prof. Spiegelman believes the bones in Australia are from Jericho residents who lived during the early Bronze Age. Some were found buried in the ground, and some inside structures.
Bones like these are a valuable source in the study of ancient diseases. Jericho is one of the oldest cities in the world - possibly more than 10,000 years old. Many of the contagious diseases still around today developed at that time. The origin of tuberculosis is still unknown, but it is believed to have first surfaced in villages and towns in our region 10,000 years ago. Because Jericho is one of the first communities uncovered from this period, researchers feel they have a good chance of finding ancient tuberculosis strains there.
This research is important in combatting worldwide plagues: Researchers need to understand how they develop, change and mutate. Many diseases appear relatively suddenly, and their distant history is unknown. In most cases, it is impossible to find remains of patients who lived in ancient times, and therefore it is hard to trace the origins of the disease. So finding the remains of ancient tuberculosis victims is very valuable.
Prof. Spiegelman, who has studied mummified jaundice victims who died in Korea in the 14th century as well as preserved corpses of tuberculosis victims from the 18th century, hopes that studying the disease's progression 6,000 years ago will help researchers understand how tuberculosis developed and how it will evolve in the future. By examining the human and animal remains uncovered in Jericho, researchers can determine how the first people living in a densly-populated community developed the disease and how their DNA - and that of the bacteria - changed over the years. The researchers hope to compare human DNA with that of animals that lived in the surrounding areas, in order to find how the disease moved from animals to humans.
The research, which is being financed by the German Science foundation, will be conducted at the Hebrew University, Al Quds University and Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. This is one of 11 projects at the Hebrew University in which Israeli, Palestinian and German researchers are cooperating.
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