Another One Bites the Dust, After He Reads It

I highly recommend reading the obituary of George J. Armelagos who, admittedly, I had not heard of until his obituary was published. But obituaries are always surprisingly interesting, revealing things that you may have missed years or decades earlier. I had the same phenomenon with Clyde Snow's obituary earlier this year.

Both were anthropologists, reading and deciphering history from bones. Great stuff, right?

And a few excerpts:

"Based on their examination of New World skeletons that displayed the bone scarring characteristic of syphilitic infection, they concluded that a progenitor of the syphilis bacterium was already present in pre-Columbian America, where it was manifest as the skin disease yaws."

...

"Still other findings are anachronistically astonishing, like the discovery by Professor Armelagos and associates of traces of the antibiotic tetracycline in 1,400-year-old Nubian skeletons from what is now Sudan. The drug was not introduced commercially until the 1940s.

"The Nubians were master brewers, and the tetracycline — born of a bacterium found in soil — was a spontaneous byproduct of their beer-making process, the researchers concluded."

...

"He remains best known to a general readership for “Consuming Passions,” which chronicled, among other things, the use throughout history of a spate of curious ingredients — including potatoes and hippopotamus snouts — thought to be endowed with aphrodisiac powers.

"In Elizabethan times, the book reveals, prunes were considered aphrodisiacs. Visitors to brothels of the period, Professor Armelagos took delight in disclosing in interviews, received a free prune with every purchase."