Average Roman worker died at 30 with bad bones

May 27, 2016 5:14 PM

Almost 2,000 working-class Roman skeletons excavated over the past 15 years show high rates of broken bones, arthritis, and bone cancer, even though the average age of death was only 30. They probably mostly ate stale bread and rotting grains, unlike the "the rich inhabitants in Pompeii - a city of expensive villas and plush domuses" who "generally avoided hard labour and ate a varied diet." The full study is available as Bones: Orthopaedic Pathologies in Roman Imperial Age. "A multidisciplinary team including orthopaedists, paleopathologists, radiologists and medical historians has evaluated the major groups of bone disease in the population finding out incredible cases and picture of ortho-traumatologic pathologies in a pre-surgical era."

Gibbon famously said about the period, "If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus."

posted by clawsoon (44 comments total)

"the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." - Thomas Hobbes
posted by dazed_one at 5:23 PM on May 27, 2016 [5 favorites]

Wait, I'm really curious now how diet would impact bone cancer!
posted by corb at 5:24 PM on May 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

Romanes eunt domuses
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:29 PM on May 27, 2016 [8 favorites]

They probably mostly ate stale bread and rotting grains

Yeah and their circensus sucked too, unless you had an irrational hatred of animals.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:30 PM on May 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

dazed_one: "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." - Thomas Hobbes

Ironically, Hobbes was arguing that that's what happened if you didn't have a powerful state to keep everyone in line.
posted by clawsoon at 5:38 PM on May 27, 2016 [20 favorites]

People called Romans they go the 'ouse?
posted by kcds at 5:38 PM on May 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

the 'ouseses
posted by Greg_Ace at 5:48 PM on May 27, 2016

This is our future if we don't put the brakes on it.
posted by praemunire at 5:51 PM on May 27, 2016 [11 favorites]

I guess a pertinent question here would be what they mean by "working class romans" and whether that overlaps or differs from, say, "slaves owned by romans". Because the type of life suggested here brings to mind the conditions of forced labor under the Spanish Colonial system or in the mines of South Africa.
posted by Jon_Evil at 6:17 PM on May 27, 2016 [14 favorites]

That's the depressing conclusion. In relative terms you have a few living in luxury and the many suffer. It has always been so.
posted by adept256 at 6:18 PM on May 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

It need not always be so.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 7:36 PM on May 27, 2016 [43 favorites]

From what I understand, the relatively high mortality rate among the average Roman worker had to do in part with the close to 50% chance of being bludgeoned to death by Titus Pullo.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:45 PM on May 27, 2016 [37 favorites]

First I had to lend you my ears; now you want my bones, too?

/Cinna the Chiropractor
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:01 PM on May 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

The Roman lifestyle involved a lot of lead poisoning. All the plumbing was lead based. They used lead containers to keep food and drink in. They used lead as an additive in wine to make it sweeter. It was everywhere in their ecosystem.
posted by w0mbat at 8:14 PM on May 27, 2016 [15 favorites]

I guess a pertinent question here would be what they mean by "working class romans" and whether that overlaps or differs from, say, "slaves owned by romans". Because the type of life suggested here brings to mind the conditions of forced labor under the Spanish Colonial system or in the mines of South Africa.

Apparently slaves and 'working-class' Romans were so similar that the Senate once considered a plan to make them wear special clothing so that they could be identified at a glance.

Conversely not all slaves were involved in hard labor.
posted by bq at 8:24 PM on May 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

"This is our future if we don't put the brakes on it."

The future is here I hate to say. Imagine boiling lead tainted water thrice Dailey or the other chemicals. While we may not have leaded sweeteners ( well, been some product contaminations, deadly particle board, bad car parts) we do have a Russian roulette of drugs a 1st yr. chemistry student can make which makes erratic lead behavior in Caligulia look quite sane.
posted by clavdivs at 9:19 PM on May 27, 2016

"Yes modern life exposes us to lots of toxic chemicals and is terrible" is a pretty bizarre takeaway for a story about how some ancient people had short, unpleasant lives and sometimes died of cancer.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 9:25 PM on May 27, 2016 [20 favorites]

Hopefully this gets away from the annoyingly persistent claim that life expectancies in earlier ages were lower than ours only because of infant mortality. In extreme cases of the fallacy there is the claim that people who got to adulthood were healthier because of the physical activity and lack of obesity. This even gets repeated by academics who are experts in areas that have nothing to do with demographics, but find it plausible and tell their students in general history lectures it's true who then suck me into arguments about it on the internet not that I'm still angry about those old fights no not me

The modern age introduced its own industrial scale nastiness but man, was life in the past brutal.

clawsoon: Props for including the Gibbon quote. That is so awesome juxtaposed with this study.
posted by mark k at 9:26 PM on May 27, 2016 [17 favorites]

I wonder why they had so much bone cancer? Is diet a cause or something or is it the injuries?
posted by fshgrl at 9:57 PM on May 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

"is a pretty bizarre takeaway for a story about how some ancient people had..."

It's bizarre that the subject has been discussed for sometime and still, some folks don't see a correlation about how things have improved but that's up to interpretation. For example, we know lead harms people, well Caligula didn't know that. So, I guess it makes it even that much more tough for the living when greed and a complacent polity continues to effect people's lives.
posted by clavdivs at 10:27 PM on May 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

I wonder why they had so much bone cancer? Is diet a cause or something or is it the injuries?
posted by fshgrl at 11:57 PM on May 27

My mere guess is the ubiquitous use of lead as mentioned above, but I admit I know nothing about this stuff other than that lead is really, really nasty stuff.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 10:27 PM on May 27, 2016

Lead as a cause seems like speculation, but there's evidence that nutritional deficiencies can increase risk of certain cancers. If you're living rough and have a poor diet, I'd bet that's causative.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:06 PM on May 27, 2016 [4 favorites]

Lead has been linked to cancer, I believe, but a) not conclusively by any means, and b) not specifically to bone cancer. Lead and Romans goes together like love and marriage, but lead in relation to bone cancer is far from a slam dunk.
posted by smoke at 12:47 AM on May 28, 2016 [3 favorites]

Maybe cancer was the norm. It could be that, genetically, cancer was far more prevalent in the general population than it is now, but it wasn't selected against because life expectancy was so low that people usually died of something else anyway.
posted by veedubya at 2:38 AM on May 28, 2016 [1 favorite]

Lead wasn't the only toxic substance commonly used, so I think there's a whole cocktail of potential causes, along with poor diet (right from birth), deplorable living conditions, lack of medicine and medical treatment, etc...

While Greeks and Romans exploited the unique properties of asbestos, they also documented its harmful effects on those who mined the silken material from ancient stone quarries. Greek geographer Strabo noted a “sickness of the lungs” in slaves who wove asbestos into cloth. Roman historian, naturalist and philosopher, Pliny the Elder, wrote of the “disease of slaves,” and actually described the use of a thin membrane from the bladder of a goat or lamb used by the slave miners as an early respirator in an attempt to protect them from inhaling the harmful asbestos fibers as they labored.
posted by sektah at 3:37 AM on May 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

“We can speculate that some of these people would have spent their lives working in nearby salt mines due to the patterns of arthritis they display.”

That could be a factor, yes.

A similar study carried out on the petrified Roman skeletons of Pompeii last year revealed the good health enjoyed by its citizens

This documentary doesn't show that many differences in the skeletons of upper and lower class Pompeiians. At the end there's the examination of the garbage pit of an insula, and the diet of the middle/working class inhabitants of the insula doesn't seem to be too dire.
posted by sukeban at 4:49 AM on May 28, 2016

Salt mines were notoriously harsh places to work; I seem to recall that the threat of being sold to a salt mine was used to keep other slaves in line.

And no wonder Christianity caught on. You can see the appeal of "there is neither slave nor free" for people who worked in these conditions or were threatened by them.

About comparisons to today: It's interesting that the Romans had their highest rate of slavery on the Italian peninsula itself. According to Wikipedia, the peninsula was 35-40% slaves, while the empire as a whole was only 8-10%. We've become good at hiding our harshest working conditions far from the centre of empire, out on Thai fishing boats and Bangladeshi garment factories and Ivory Coast cacao farms.
posted by clawsoon at 5:15 AM on May 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

mark k: It's not a specious argument in all cases. For example, in the Paleolithic, you see a lot of infant mortality but also healthy adult skeletons that died around the ages we die now. Whereas in the Neolithic, you see an actual honest-to-God life expectancy of around 30. Your average Roman's life was hard and short, but during the Dark Ages it actually lengthened and improved.

History is not a straight line, with everything starting out awful and consistently getting better and better. It goes up and down. And just because high infant mortality doesn't throw off the average in every single case, that doesn't mean it never has.
posted by Anyamatopoeia at 5:53 AM on May 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

I've lost the link but I just recently read an article about disability and later years that had really interesting numbers from disability rejections in military inducties in the civil war, WWI and WWII. The number of disabled men at the age of twenty was staggeringly high in the civil war (like in the 50 percent range) and declined by about half for each war thereafter.

One of the greatest unheralded successes of modern medicine and nutrition has been the decrease in disability. Mostly because people forget how bad things were even just a generation ago.
posted by srboisvert at 6:11 AM on May 28, 2016 [8 favorites]

Another take on the lead thing
posted by BWA at 6:15 AM on May 28, 2016

If they were eating rotting grains, I can imagine they were getting some moderate doses of all sorts of mold and bacterial toxins. That could definitely push one in the direction of cancer.
posted by constantinescharity at 6:20 AM on May 28, 2016 [5 favorites]

mark k: It's not a specious argument in all cases. For example, in the Paleolithic, you see a lot of infant mortality but also healthy adult skeletons that died around the ages we die now.

Hmm. If you have a link to a study that tries to estimate how long a paleolithic adult could be expected to live if they reached age 20 I'd be very interested, it's outside my scope of reading. That some paleolithic people died as old, healthy adults I certainly believe is true, but mortality rates of adults is a different and more difficult question.

AFAIK It's well settled that agriculture reduced dietary diversity and increased disease, and adults became smaller and with poorer teeth as a result.
posted by mark k at 6:42 AM on May 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Cities eat people"
I can't remember where I first read this, but this was the standard line when I was reading about life in ancient Rome twenty years ago. Pre-modern cities only survived by a constant influx of people from the countryside to replace the population who died in the city of various epidemics, accidents and interpersonal violence. It used to be believed that Roman cities were not as prone to this as others, because of their sewer systems and baths. But the sewers had to cope with variations in rainfall in Italy, and were probably reservoirs of infection in the summer. The baths were places where illnesses were transmitted - doctors at the time advised people who were unwell or had open wounds to avoid them. Rome certainly had endemic malaria from the 5th century onwards, and so it may have had it earlier as well.

(Also, I wonder if the statement on bone cancer could be something lost in translation; there are a lot of cancers that metastasize to bone, and once the rest of the body has decomposed those metastases will be the only thing with survives archaeologically.)
posted by Vortisaur at 12:42 PM on May 28, 2016 [13 favorites]

It'd be interesting to know what percentage of those "2,000 working-class Roman skeletons" were male or female --- I'd guess the males would be more involved with heavy physical labor like construction and heavy things dropped/falls from heights, so that's where there'd be a lot of bone breakages; and more females in industries like laundries, with higher arthritis or repetitive-motion injuries.
posted by easily confused at 1:14 PM on May 28, 2016

Just to add to the background info about lead, "Zinc, copper, arsenic, tin, antimony, silver, gold, and bismuth are common impurities in lead minerals." So bone cancer might not be directly related to the lead, but these metals cause a series of health issues before we even get to talking about organic toxins in people's diet.

"Lead has been shown many times to permanently reduce the cognitive capacity of children at extremely low levels of exposure." And, at a societal level, cancer might be a lesser worry, if a large part of your population was exposed to these relatively huge levels of lead.
posted by sneebler at 1:29 PM on May 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

I wonder what kind of effect childbearing on a s#!+ diet without modern medicine would have on working-class women's bones.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 3:36 PM on May 28, 2016 [4 favorites]

Aflatoxins produced by moulds that infect grains and roots (like peanuts*) are potent carcinogens in humans; the liver has enzymes to break it down, but unfortunately the breakdown products intercalate (gets stuck inside strands) DNA and causes genomic damage leading to cancer where those catabolite accumulate - in the liver.

Metastatic liver cancer commonly colonizes bones.

*I can't remember which SE Asian country it was, but the government decided that they wanted their populace to grow taller/heavier and needed to supplement their population - especially their children - with protein. Peanut butter was an economic method of achieving this. However, they ended up sourcing their peanut butter that was made from leavings and scrapings and otherwise low quality peanuts, feedstock that was often contaminated with aflatoxins. Before the developmental effects were realized, there was a massive outbreak of liver cancer in children... which was eventually traced back to the cheap government peanut butter.
posted by porpoise at 4:48 PM on May 28, 2016 [12 favorites]

That's a great connection, porpoise. I wonder if there's any way your hypothesis could be tested, because it seems plausible enough to make testing for it worthwhile.
posted by clawsoon at 6:20 PM on May 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Gibbon was writing in the 1770s. In many ways, the life of a typical (European) person hadn't much improved since the height of Rome.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:28 PM on May 28, 2016 [2 favorites]

Peanuts come from South America, but these guys were probably eating lots of lentils and chickpeas, apart from the grain dole.
posted by sukeban at 12:10 AM on May 29, 2016

clawsoon - unfortunately soft tissue from that era/location was not preserved, only hard bone tumour have.

Found an interesting historical review; cancer was well described by the ancient Greeks and the Romans (Galen) were well aware of liver cancer - and recognized that cancers had to be removed, and removed early, or it would spread (metastasize), especially leading to breast cancer.

"...when the diet is of the nature that produces a large amount of thick blood and the spleen is weakly attracting the humor..."

Maybe the ancient Romans recognized contaminated food as a risk factor?
posted by porpoise at 8:59 AM on May 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

Calcium deficiency is linked to an increased risk of bone cancer; that could easily be associated with poor diet.
posted by yarntheory at 7:26 PM on May 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hopefully this gets away from the annoyingly persistent claim that life expectancies in earlier ages were lower than ours only because of infant mortality

This is literally one study in one region looking at one population in one city at one particular time period. This overturns nothing about the established fact that average life expectancies are driven down by increased mortality during early life. This is not just a fact of historical demography but is an observed fact even in modern times. If you have a problem with this, then you are welcome to go beyond citing a single line in a non-academic review and instead cite the actual numbers and interpretation of the authors.
posted by Panjandrum at 10:04 PM on May 29, 2016

Hmm. If you have a link to a study that tries to estimate how long a paleolithic adult could be expected to live if they reached age 20 I'd be very interested, it's outside my scope of reading.

Here's one that estimates life expectancy throughout the Paleolithic, showing it getting longer and longer as humans evolve until it reaches a crescendo in the Upper Paleolithic.
posted by Anyamatopoeia at 5:09 PM on May 30, 2016