Palaeopathology of Aboriginal Australians: Health and Disease across a Hunter-Gatherer Continent

by Stephen Webb

Using data collected from all parts of the continent, this book is a study of the health of Australia's original inhabitants over 50,000 years. It represents the first continental survey of its kind and is the first to quantify and describe important aspects of Australian hunter-gatherer health. Major categories of disease described are: stress, osteoarthritis, fractures, congenital deformations, neoplasms and non-specific and treponemal infections. The author also describes some surgical techniques used by Aboriginal people. A broad-ranging book offering fresh insight into the study of Australian prehistory and Aboriginal culture, the book also illuminates the origins and ecology of human disease.

340 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1995

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Since gaining a BSc in physics from the University of Bristol and a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Manchester, Stephen Webb has worked in a variety of universities in the UK. He is a regular contributor to the Yearbook of Astronomy series and has published an undergraduate textbook on distance determination in astronomy and cosmology as well as several popular science books. His interest in the Fermi paradox combines lifelong interests in both science and science fiction.

Reviews

[10000 WPM · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The history of mankind is the history of its diseases."
(Henschen 1966:25)

Webb made it clear that in paleopathology you're working in the dark, trying to come to conclusions based only on skeletal remains, often incomplete and in poor condition. The ingenuity in the markers and signs used to get information from that surprised me, even though a lot of it is, inevitably, speculation. Food stress and anemia being visible on bones is super interesting. Harris lines don't show up to mark stress unless the stress ends and you recover from it! There's a lot of variation in the stress people were under, and those of the desert seem the healthiest overall. The people of the Central Murray were under a lot of stress despite it being known as a fertile region. Probably due to infectious disease in dense, sedentary settlements, and growing populations being difficult to support with older methods... it might have been a struggling society in transition from hunting and gathering...
There are some differences between regions in how often people fought, it's hard to come to solid conclusions about societies with this but the parrying fractures were cool. It's clear that the injured were taken care of while healing... also, people with rare congenital malformations could live and grow into adulthood, or at least live for relatively long, depending on the severity of their malformation. Surgical procedures like amputations were performed and worked!The joints that developed osteoarthritis differed greatly between regions. It's kind of a shot in the dark but speculation about what kind of work people mostly did based on this was interesting.
This is a great and very interesting broad study of the lives people lived all over the continent. It feels like Webb was examining aboriginal people and their history with respect and great curiosity.
I was initially drawn in by the documented cases of healed injuries in the trauma section but it all ended up being so interesting I might just seek out more paleopathology, probably starting with Steinbock. I took a peek there already because Webb cited him in saying likely cancer and arthritis has been found on dinosaur skeletons... omg I'd never really considered that
Importantly, it seems a lot of people had a different view of death and injury than I do, and I feel inspired by thinking that people have in all times kept on living and taking care of each other with scars and injuries and terrible diseases.