When Dogs and Men Shared Meals and Parasites

Must Farm, 9th century B.C.E.

From the Discover magazine blog comes a deep look at the human and canine parasites found at Must Farm, a Bronze Age farm in the fen (swampy part) of southwestern England:

A previous study of ancient poop preserved at a Bronze Age farm in southwestern England revealed residents there were infected with both roundworm and whipworm, which spread through food contaminated with human feces.

The fen folk were afflicted with different digestive hangers-on, however. The Must Farm team turned up the eggs of both fish tapeworms and giant kidney worms in fecal material collected from the site. Both parasites can be ingested by eating raw or undercooked aquatic animals, such as fish, frogs and mollusks.

While fish tapeworms stay in the gut, where they can grow to more than 30 feet in length, giant kidney worms, as their name suggests, take up residence in the kidney, destroying the organ as they grow to more than three feet in length.

The team also identified eggs of the Echinostoma worm. It’s perhaps not quite as nightmarish as the others, but it can still cause intestinal lining inflammation. Even less threatening, the researchers’ analysis turned up evidence of pig whipworm and Capillaria worm, both likely from eating land animals, though it’s unclear whether they were domesticated or wild. Neither parasite poses a particular threat to humans.

Several of the parasites identified, including the ghastly fish tapeworm and giant kidney worm, are the earliest examples of the animals infecting humans in Britain, according to the research team.

Interestingly, some of the soggy stuff the team analyzed turned out to be fecal matter from dogs rather than humans. The two species shared similar parasite profiles, suggesting that dogs were eating scraps of human food, or perhaps even shared their meals.