ABSTRACT
From the very beginning of human history, infectious diseases have been life threatening, and have often been instrumental in major social change. For those engaged in research into the history of human disease, an understanding of how they work is vitally important to our reconstruction of how people lived their lives, as their spread is strongly related to social and economic factors, such as nutrition, demography, community hygiene, ranking and status. The evidence, most of it skeletal, whether studied by conventional osteology or by biomolecular science, enables us to create models explaining the evolution of diseases and their vectors and can help establish a better overall understanding of these societies and human adaptation to disease.
