I was refering to a post which said NO cancer was evident in Ancient Egypt, that is wrong. Cancer has been an 'animal' disease since the dawn of time.
There will always be people who take a paucity of evidence as evidence that something did not happen. A bit like those creationists who take the lack of fossil evidence of the first life forms (no hard parts = no fossils!) as 'proof' that life was made complete, and those first simple life forms did not exist. This is a form of stupidity that I have seen so many times. As far as cancer is concerned, before the present medical competence in diagnosis, it was mostly misdiagnosed. While the first knowledge of cancer goes back to the ancient Egyptians, (http://cancer.about.com/od/historyofcancer/a/cancerhistory.htm) it has been poorly understood through most of human history and prehistory, and not correctly diagnosed. The fact that it was usually not recognised by ancient physicians does not mean it did not exist, and more than the idiocy of creationists about early life. In the same way, the limited number of fossils showing cancer, is not evidence for its absense. Fossils mostly are hard parts preserved. The soft tissues that show cancer sign, decay away long before. Absense of evidence is not evidence of absense. The idea that cancer is new is a crackpot idea, and not shared by genuine experts on cancer.
