The largest Copper Age tomb found evidence of a possible epidemic of tuberculosis in children

The study was published in the International Journal of Paleopathology.

The authors studied the remains of children and adolescents from a collective burial that is about 5,000 years old. They focused on porous bone lesions and changes that palaeopathology associates with respiratory infections.

Important: Scientists do not claim that every child had TB specifically. It is possible to see traces of disease or strain on the body from the bones, but it is not always possible to accurately name the causative agent. Tuberculosis is seen as one possibility, which still needs to be tested using ancient DNA and other methods.

Details

Camino del Molino is a large Copper Age collective burial site in the Caravaca de la Cruz area of Murcia, south-eastern Spain. The remains of more than 1,300 people have been found in it. Such burials were used for a long time: new generations were buried next to earlier remains, so the bones were often mixed up and poorly preserved.

Against this background, the 48 well-preserved child and adolescent skeletons are particularly important. They allowed researchers to study not individual bones but almost whole bodies and look for recurring signs of disease.

According to a retelling of the study, 92 per cent of the children and adolescents studied had at least some bone changes associated with the disease state. About two-thirds had a combination of porous bone lesions and signs that might indicate respiratory infections.

What exactly did the scientists see? Primarily porous bones in the skull and long bones, as well as changes on the inside of the skull, vertebrae, pelvic bones and other areas. Some of these marks resemble changes that later and better-studied cases have attributed to infections of the respiratory system.

The researchers paid special attention to two age groups: children 1 to 4 years old and adolescents 10 to 14 years old. They were the ones in whom signs of the disease were particularly common. This is important because young children and teens can be especially vulnerable to lung infections, including tuberculosis.

The possible causes are not reducible to a single microbe. Rather, the authors speak of a broad disease burden: children may have encountered smoke inside dwellings, dust, particles of organics from food processing and crafts, close contact with animals, and infections that were passed from animals to humans.

So we may not be talking about one short outbreak, but about harsh living conditions in which respiratory diseases kept coming back and affecting children again and again.

Why it matters

The study shows how vulnerable children in prehistoric farming and pastoralist communities could have been. They lived near animals, breathed smoke from hearths, participated in the daily life of the settlement and may have been in constant contact with sources of infection.

This is also an important example of how bones can tell us not only about death, but also about life. Changes on a skeleton don't necessarily show what a person died of. But they do help us understand what illnesses he or she had, the stresses he or she faced, and how harsh the environment in which he or she grew up may have been.

Separately, the researchers say, children with signs of illness were not excluded from the general burial ritual. They were buried in the same way as other members of the community. This suggests that illness, disability or unusual physical features did not necessarily lead to isolation after death.

Background

The Copper Age on the Iberian Peninsula was a time of complex social change. People lived more sedentary lives, engaged in farming and herding, and formed large collective burial communities. Such communities may have been closely knit within themselves, but this is what increased the risk of spreading infections.

Camino del Molino is already known to archaeologists as an exceptional monument. In previous works, it was described as a collective tomb with 1,348 individuals, where people of different ages and genders were represented. Trepanation - skull surgery - has also been mentioned among the finds, showing the complexity and unusual nature of this archaeological complex.

The new study adds a medical layer to this picture. It shows that behind the rich archaeological material were real health problems - especially in children.

Source

Study: Sonia Díaz-Navarro et al, "Porous skeletal lesions and respiratory infection-related changes in Chalcolithic non-adults: A biocultural approach from Camino del Molino (southeastern Iberia)", International Journal of Paleopathology, 2026.