Where did cancer even come from? Was it a problem 50-100 years ago?

Where did cancer even come from? Was it a problem 50-100 years ago?

Ákos Németh, 10+ years time interest in History and sociohistory

Answered Jul 2 · Upvoted by Zugravu Corina-Aurelia, studied Medicine and Healthcare at UMF Carol Davila (1989)

Cancer came from being multi-cellular, sophisticated organism using specialized cell for different functions.

The problem investigating older cancer cases, that cancer is mainly soft tissue disease. Only bone cancers fossilise well.
The oldest cancer case we found is more than 240 million years old. It found in a turtle, which had an aggressive type of bone cancer.

In human ancestors, bone cancer was found in 2 million (1,98 million) years old Australopithecus bones.

In short cancer is when certain cells forget what they should do in an organized body due to unrepaired genetic damage. The cells have multiple defensive lines to avoid the cells go rouge, like genetic repair, multiplication countdown, programmed cell death, immune system hunter-seeker methods.

If all of those line fail, we develop cancer. Over time the possible damages accumulate and eventually some of those cells break through all defense and develop to tumor.

Human medicine know about cancer for long time, first described in ancient Egypt. It was a non curable disease, but relatively rare. People died more often in many more disease. Today we are able to cure most of them. But cancer is a tricky bastard. They evolve, change as the tumor develops, so at the time of detection they have already multiple strain, requiring different methods and chemicals to kill them (while healthy cells remains alive). This is the reson why so hard to cure higher stage cancers.

So we can say, the increased numbers of cancerous deaths are the results of modern age. We cured the other reasons, people used to die ffrom.

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