A Bronze Age man buried in a monumental tomb near the Black Sea may have died from complications of a urinary tract infection (UTI) more than five millennia ago, according to a new study. Archaeologists identified a grape-size object consistent with a kidney or bladder stone in the man's burial.
"He lived with a chronic urogenital infection," study lead author Natalia Berezina, an anthropologist at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, told Live Science in an email.
"It was not a brief episode," she said. "His last years were probably marked by considerable and more or less constant pain."
Berezina and colleagues investigated a small, stone-like object found in an Early Bronze Age burial in the Stavropol Upland region of southwestern Russia. They published their findings Sept. 30 in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.
The burial was part of a kurgan cemetery, an ancient steppe funeral tradition that involved constructing a large mound of dirt over a grave. Archaeologists discovered a cat...
English (US)