MrDarwin

Just a few bits I found in a cursory websearch:

<a href="http://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/nat_amer/pre/htmls/lp_id.html" target="_blank">http://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/nat_amer/pre/htmls/lp_id.html</a>
("superior medicine" did not prevent young women from dying in childbirth, and "nearly half of the Oneota people buried in a cemetery in Fulton County died as a result of violence")

<a href="http://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/nat_amer/pre/htmls/w_id.html" target="_blank">http://www.museum.state.il.us/muslink/nat_amer/pre/htmls/w_id.html</a>
("Infants, young children, and old adults were particularly vulnerable to infectious diseases.")

<a href="http://www.farwestern.com/brazilmound/page28.html" target="_blank">http://www.farwestern.com/brazilmound/page28.html</a>
("At the Brazil site, these studies showed that the people had many of the same problems we have today - tooth decay, broken bones, infectious diseases, and sometimes poor nutrition. One way that the health of these prehistoric people was very different from ours was in how long they lived: many more children died before the age of five, and the average life span of an adult was about 45 years. This seems very short by modern standards, but it is typical for prehistoric California, where daily life was more demanding and medical treatment was less developed. Women died much more often in childbirth than they do today, and problems that we consider minor - an abscessed tooth, for instance, or a high fever - often caused death for prehistoric people.")

Autonemesis

[pointless screed removed]

[ July 30, 2002: Message edited by: Kind Bud ]</p>

Mageth

I remember reading an article about a skull found in North America believed to be 40,000 years old.

Hmm. I thought the oldest known human fossils from the Americas were 11-12k years old. Can you produce the article?

Some theories of the origin of syphilis have it as a new-world disease brought back to the old world, possibly by Columbus, and thus explaining its explosion in Europe in the 15th-16th Centuries.

GeoTheo

No I don't have a link. Sorry. I was hoping maybe someone else had heard of it.