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from the should-have-switched-to-an-e-cig dept.
Cancer is often viewed as a fundamentally modern and monolithic disease. Many people think its rise and spread has been driven almost exclusively by the developed world's toxins and poisons; by our bad eating habits, lifestyles, and the very air we breathe.
Actually, cancer is not a single disease. It is also far from modern. New fossil evidence suggests that its origins lie deep in prehistory.
We recently published two papers in the South African Journal of Science that describe the discovery and diagnosis of the earliest benign tumour and earliest malignant cancer to affect the human family.
Tumours and cancers are collectively known as neoplastic diseases. Until now, the oldest evidence of neoplasia in the hominin fossil record dated back 120,000 years. This was found in a rib fragment of a Neanderthal from Krapina in Croatia.
But our discovery, in two South African cave sites, offers definitive evidence of cancer in hominins – human ancestors – as far back as 1.7 million years ago.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @01:27PM
It's entirely different to almost every other way that we can die.
Autoimmunity is similar in some ways. Cancer happens because immune surveillance is under-responsive to self-tissue that is different and autoimmunity is when the immune system is over-responsive to self-tissue that is normal. Your immune system will eventually make this mistake as immune tolerance breaks-down with age (if you don't die of something else).
An immunology professor that I knew once said that autoimmunity is the price we pay for our immune system to be so good at detecting and destroying cancer cells.
Other non-random mutation causes of cancer include infectious disease (HPV, HTLV, EBV, etc.) and genomic instability (Philadelphia chromosome).