It’s hard to say what feels worse: having a kidney stone the size of a grape, or the embarrassment of archaeologists finding that kidney stone among your remains 5,300 years after you died. At least you’re dead, right?
According to research published in the journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, a Bronze Age man buried in a monumental kurgan tomb in southwestern Russia lived a tough, likely miserable life on the steppe, all the while dealing with what was probably an incredible amount of urological pain.
Archaeologists May Have Found a 5,300-Year-Old Kidney Stone the Size of a Grape
Lead author Natalia Berezina and her team from Lomonosov Moscow State University analyzed the man’s 5,000-year-old skeleton, and based on his body alone, they deduced he lived a rough life. Heavy labor. Suffered from gout. Had multiple healed bone fractures, likely from dealing with cattle or heavy wagons. And then there was the most painful discovery, the find that will cause us to wins over 5000 years later: a jagged, brown, 0.8 inch mineral mass about the size of a grape found among some hand bones.
X-ray diffraction revealed the specimen contained whitlockite, a calcium salt that acts as a telltale sign for bacterial activity. Without the wonders of modern medicine, this guy spent his final years riding horses and hauling freight across the harsh landscape while dealing with a kidney stone that probably made every waking moment sheer misery.
If the stone eventually blocked his ureter, it likely triggered sepsis, ending a life that must have been miserable.
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