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 language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Handbook of Mummy Studies |
Subtitle of host publication | New Frontiers in Scientific and Cultural Perspectives |
Publisher | Springer Nature |
Pages | 547-561 |
Number of pages | 15 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9789811533549 |
ISBN (Print) | 9789811533532 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 18 Nov 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Archaeoparasitology
- China
- Mummy
- Russia
- Siberia
- South korea