Dental News - Teeth help shine a light on the health of people during the Dark Ages

Dental Tribune International

Fri. 23. November 2018

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TÜBINGEN, Germany: When one thinks of the medieval period from the fifth to the tenth centuries, often referred to as the Dark Ages, it may be easy to presume that the health of many people might not have been very good. However, new research has shown that even people of the middle and lower classes of that period were healthier than their descendants in later centuries—even as late as the nineteenth-century industrial age.

In an unprecedented study, a team of economists, archaeologists and anthropologists have collected data on human health in Europe over a 2,000-year period. The findings on the evaluation of individuals’ teeth, their stature and various other factors concerning the quality of their diet and the apparent physical burden of their work have been published in a new book titled The Backbone of Europe: Health, Diet, Work and Violence over Two Millennia.

Prof. Jörg Baten, an economic historian at the University of Tübingen, worked with Profs. Richard H. Steckel and Clark Spencer Larsen of Ohio State University in Columbus in the US and Prof. Charlotte A. Roberts from Durham University in the UK, as well as numerous others, to compile the vast database across a broad cross section of European countries. To obtain an overall understanding of the history and development of human health, violence and division of labour, Baten and a team of 75 anthropologists and bio-archaeologists spent a decade examining more than 15,000 human skeletons. The remains were drawn from more than 100 locations across Europe and had been buried between the third century BCE and the mid-nineteenth century.

According to the researchers, one of the most interesting findings was that from the sixth century on, health overall steadily deteriorated for a long period—from the early Middle Ages to the era of industrialisation. Baten and his co-authors believe this is explained by increasing population density, rising social inequality, and the Little Ice Age from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The researchers also added that the activity of states in Europe from the fifteenth century onward had an effect in countering the trend of poor health in the population, and government also helped to increase security, leading to less violence in European societies.

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