An archaeological breakthrough has revealed that smoking may not just yellow your teeth but literally change your bones. What’s more, the new research reveals that smoking culture in Georgian- and Victorian-era UK may be very different to what we thought it was.
“What was surprising was quite how many women had evidence for tobacco use,” the principal investigator of the new research, Dr Sarah Inskip, told BBC Science Focus. “This is at odds to many prevailing historical narratives which suggest it was really a male habit. It is important to consider this, as it would have been a significant risk factor for ill health in women as well as men.”
The findings, published in journal Science Advances, could also be used to help solve modern crime investigations. Knowing whether someone was a smoker or non-smoker could be key information to identifying remains – but the new research method could also be used to reveal information like what food someone ate.
“Any individualising information you can get is helpful for creating a biological profile of a body or skeleton where their identity is unknown,” Inskip said. “This can be useful for individual cases, or in the event of mass fatalities. We need to do a lot more work […] but in the future, the possibilities look very exciting.”
So how can they work this out? The researchers identified tell-tale signs of smoking in the molecular structure of bones: the molecules left in the smokers’ bones once their bodies had processed (or ‘metabolised’) the tobacco.
First, the team analysed the remains of 323 human bodies dating back to the 12th century. These included 177 people buried in London and 146 in Lincolnshire.
Since tobacco was introduced to Western Europe in the 16th century, the researchers started with the remains of people who had lived before this time so they had something to compare their results to. While most of the individuals lived between 1500 and 1855 AD, 45 of them lived between 1150 and 1500 AD.
Some of the other remains were clearly those of smokers because of the characteristic marks on their teeth caused by old-fashioned clay pipes. But not all smokers exhibited these signs – partly because tobacco was not just smoked, but also sniffed as snuff (powdered tobacco) or chewed as leaves.
The researchers tested tiny samples of the individuals’ bones using a process called liquid chromatography, which separated the samples into their chemical parts.
This revealed clear differences between the definite non-smokers and the definite smokers: signs, or ‘biomarkers’, to look out for in the other bodies. More specifically, the tests revealed that the tobacco left a metabolic record in their cortical bone (the dense outer layer of tissue that provides our skeletons with strength).
Then, when the team looked for this sign in the other remains, they discovered that over half of the skeletons showed signs of long-term tobacco use. That’s over four times higher than the present-day rates in the UK.
According to Inskip, the new method could help to build our understanding of modern health issues.
“The results show that archaeological bone is a very valuable source of past biological data,” she said. “It is very exciting and my future work is now looking at respiratory diseases, which are a massive threat today.”
About our expert
Dr Sarah Inskip is a researcher based at the University of Leicester where she is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History. Her research has been published in the journals Nature Communications, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences and American Journal of Physical Anthropology.
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