I was face-palming pretty hard at the beginning of the article, because my first thought was that, statistically, cancer is an old person's disease. Then, halfw

I was face-palming pretty hard at the beginning of the article, because my first thought was that, statistically, cancer is an old person's disease. Then, halfway down the article: Almost all the mummies and skeletons were of people who died before the age of 50. "Ageing is one of the major causes of cancer," says Schüz. He dismissed as "weak" the authors' argument that they could find evidence for other diseases of ageing, such as arthritis and hardening of the arteries, and that cancer should therefore have shown up too. "In men today, 90 per cent of cancers occur after 50," he says. "So if you examined the bodies of 1000 modern men who died before 50, you wouldn't find many cancers either." -- We already know that individual cancers have different causes and different pathologies; breast cancer doesn't behave like pancreatic cancer, for instance. So, it's incorrect to say that cancer is a modern disease; it may be that some cancers are, and others are not. However, cancer is certainly a greater risk for older persons, and large numbers of people reaching 70, 80, and 90 years is a relatively recent phenomenon. Along with that rise in median ages, you would expect to see a rise of occurrences of certain diseases, like cancer.