Mummies and skeletonized individuals to reveal the relationship of parasitism, social complexity, and subsistence strategy in Eurasian Continent

Sergey Mikhailovich Slepchenko, Min Seo, Jong Ha Hong, Chang Seok Oh, Dong Hoon Shin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

There was a pioneering speculation that the parasitism of mankind has changed continuously and sometimes dramatically in association with the social changes in history such as the emergence of complex societies or evolution of subsistence strategies. Though this assumption was based on the outcomes of archaeoparasitological studies at the Colorado Plateau of North America, very few supporting reports were available from the Eurasian continent to date. To corroborate this idea more convincingly, we aim to compare the parasitological results of different Eurasian archaeological sites where human populations of varying social complexity depended on different subsistence strategies throughout history. In this chapter, we thus reviewed archaeoparasitological reports on the Siberian native peoples as nomads, fishermen, and hunter-gatherers, Russian migrant-descendants, and Korean and Chinese pre-modern mummies as the people of agriculture-based society. The current report reveals that Reinhard and Araujo's hypothesis (2008) about the relationship between serious parasitism and complex societies could be also applicable to the Old World archaeoparasitological cases.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Handbook of Mummy Studies
Subtitle of host publicationNew Frontiers in Scientific and Cultural Perspectives
PublisherSpringer Nature
Pages547-561
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9789811533549
ISBN (Print)9789811533532
DOIs
StatePublished - 18 Nov 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021. All rights reserved.

Keywords

  • Archaeoparasitology
  • China
  • Mummy
  • Russia
  • Siberia
  • South korea

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