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Archaeologists in Spain have unearth a battered Roman - era skull that hold scrape of violent trauma and may harbor sign of a brain tumour . However , not everyone is convinced that this battle - marred humanity had a tumor , with one expert telling Live Science the findings are ambiguous .
The skull , discovered in 2019 during a caving expedition to the Sima de Marcenejas in northerly Spain , dates to between A.D. 258 and 409 and belong to to a human who was probable between 30 and 40 years old when he died , mayhap only decades before thefall of the Western Roman Empire .
The skull, pictured above, before it was restored by the team.
The outside of the skull harbored three lesion , which formed before he died and were probably because of one or more wild attacks . The other was on the inside and may have been the result of a vulgar type of mind neoplasm called ameningioma , which would make it the first known case in an archaeological specimen determine in the Iberian Peninsula .
" What is interesting about this finding is that it declare oneself a window onto the health of past population , and bring up fundamental questions for us about the ability of individuals to survive these precondition , and their quality of living thereafter , " extend authorDaniel Rodríguez - Iglesias , an archaeologist at the Spanish National Research Center for Human Evolution ( CENIEH ) , say in astatement .
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The authors usedmicro - computed tomography(microCT ) to build a 3D model of the inside and outside of the skull . The control surface wound ranged from 0.29 to 0.7 inch ( 0.7 to 1.8 centimeters ) long and 0.04 to 0.59 inch ( 0.1 to 1.5 centimetre ) wide . The wound were on the top of the head , suggesting violent trauma rather than an accidental twilight .
The inside lesion , however , could have been a meningioma , the authors hypothesise . They compared the lesion with a modern meningioma in a42 - twelvemonth - sometime womanand found that the historical lesion was similar in location , size and shape . They ruled out lawsuit such as metabolic or infective disease because there was only one internal wound and no sign of tissue paper thickener between the two layers of bone in the skull .
But not everyone is convinced that the internal lesion is a genius tumor .
" In contrast to the traumatic lesions on the ectocranial [ exterior ] airfoil , which are quite clear , the lesion interpreted as triggered by a potential meningioma is quite ambiguous,“Christian Meyer , head of OsteoARC in Germany , who was not demand in the study , told Live Science in an electronic mail .
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The findings were published July 28 in the journalVirtual Archaeology Review .
