Can examples of ancient human bone neoplasms inform current biomedical bone cancer research

Whilst cancer is often considered to be a modern disease, examples of bone neoplasms can be seen in skeletal remains from ancient human populations. Such ancient examples suggest it is neither a distinctly modern, nor ancient, disease in humans. This essay evaluates the paleopathological study of metastatic carcinoma in relevance to modern biomedical studies, addressing whether the available evidence of these investigations can reliably be used in the development of new methods of bone cancer treatment.