Recently I have begun work on a project (Robbins et al., 2009) looking at evidence for leprosy in skeletal material from Balathal, a village in Rajasthan occupied during the Indus Age. There is one skeleton from a 40-year old male that demonstrates lesions on his face that are characteristic of leprosy. This individual represents the oldest documented skeletal evidence for the disease in the world. His presence (at 2000 BC) in a village in Rajasthan provides support for the suggestion that early Vedic scriptures composed before the first millennium B.C. are the first textual reference to leprosy. The presence of leprosy in skeletal material dated to the post-urban phase of the Indus Age also has implications for theories about the origin and initial migration routes of M. leprae. If the disease evolved in Africa during the late Pleistocene, then it migrated to India during the Late Holocene, possibly during the third millennium B.C. at a time when there was substantial interaction among the Indus Civilization, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. This evidence is impetus to look for additional skeletal and molecular evidence of leprosy in India and Africa during the Late Holocene to confirm the African origin of the disease. In 2010, I will travel back to India to collect samples from the Balathal skeleton and we will attempt to extract aDNA of the pathogen. We will use that material to exmine hypotheses about the origins and ancient migration route of the disease. With my colleague Dr. Veena Mushrif and a former student, Kelsey Gray, I will also be examining the skeletal collections for Harappa and Kalibangan to look for evidence of disease, including leprosy, during the Indus Civilization.

Brief Powerpoint presentation of my leprosy research