One Paleopathology: Lessons from the Past

One Paleopathology (OPP) expands the One Health perspective into the past. It is based on an understanding of the evolution-based susceptibilities, pathological manifestations, and contextual factors that determined the occurrences and impacts of human, animal and plant diseases across time. This rich, comprehensive perspective is based upon using an interdisciplinary approach that goes beyond descriptions and diagnoses to determine why diseases occurred when and where they did. Like One Health, its emphasis is on the connections between human, animal and plant health and the environment. Thus, in the same way that history explains the present, OPP exposes the origins of the health and disease landscapes of today.

Working across disciplines is critical to the OPP approach, as no one discipline contains all the knowledge and expertise needed. For infectious diseases, the traditional emphasis on human infection (zoonotic) usually means the question of why and how animals became infected is not considered. When this question is addressed using an OPP approach, the profound impacts of how domestic environments, spillover from infected humans and human activities (i.e.: farming, trade, migration, colonization, war etc.) have enhanced pathogen transmission and virulence across time, landscapes and species becomes apparent. As exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus needs to be on more than the initial species jump, because humans have been instrumental in spreading infections to numerous other species across scales ranging from local to global. This was also true of many infectious diseases in the past, but requires input from a range of disciplines to be fully characterized.

The OPP approach also facilitates understanding of how the interplay between evolution-based susceptibilities and environmental factors - natural and human influenced, have determined the impacts of both infectious and noninfectious diseases. For example, an OPP approach can integrate how climate change, natural and anthropogenic disasters, and geological factors (characterized in medical geology) often in combination with human activities like colonization and wars, have affected the prevalence, distribution, and severity of human and animal diseases as well as influenced human history.

Finally, the impacts of disease are often determined by how people and animals respond to them. OPP provides the evolutionary, comparative, archeological and historical perspectives needed to characterize the basis and effectiveness of these responses. Human understanding and responses to disease have varied across time and cultures in terms of accuracy and effectiveness, and this has often determined the spread and impacts of diseases both regionally and historically. Animals also exhibit protective, therapeutic, and avoidant responses to disease. These responses have both informed indigenous healers and been overridden, often with negative consequences, in domestic and colonial environments. Comprehensive investigations of past human and animal diseases provide critical information about how to effectively respond to the diseases of today as both the failures and successful historical outcomes of the past can be characterized and analyzed. We propose incorporation of the OPP perspective into the study of disease in archeological and historical contexts and invite researchers to use this broad interrogative approach across temporal scales to reveal the complexities of the contextual factors that have influenced human and animal health and disease across time.

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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: paleopathology, health, human, non-human

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