Contact: Sarah Nicholas

STARKVILLE, Miss.—A Mississippi State University faculty member provides critical updates regarding the spread of infectious diseases and rise of chronic and degenerative diseases in a second edition of her co-authored book “Emerging Infections: Three Epidemiological Transitions from Prehistory to the Present” released this summer. Her work on ancient DNA also has been published this summer in several highly lauded scientific journals.

An Oxford University Press peer-reviewed book, “Emerging Infections” is the first comprehensive review of the biological, social and environmental factors that contribute to emerging infectious diseases, like COVID-19, as well as surging rates of chronic and degenerative diseases, like cancer, from prehistory to the present day. It provides an overview of significant developments in health and disease research since the original work was published a decade ago.

Professor Molly K. Zuckerman, a biological anthropologist in MSU’s Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures who recently was appointed as a research associate in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, said, “In this new edition, we explore how both ancient and modern changes in human behavior—from the start of farming to the rise of fast, low-cost international travel—has driven recent epidemics, including COVID-19 and obesity. By looking at our health and disease through deep time, not just the present, we can identify the most foundational causes of our current health problems and strategies for ameliorating them now and preventing them in the future.

“We’re facing a future where once controlled diseases, like measles, are surging back because of vaccine hesitancy, and antimicrobials are no longer as effective even against common diseases,” Zuckerman added. “At the same time, we’re dealing with deadly new viruses coupled with still rising rates of our most common killers, such as heart disease and cancer.”

Book co-authors include Ron Barrett, associate professor of anthropology at Minnesota’s Macalester College; Matthew Ryan Dudgeon, assistant professor of hospital medicine at Emory University; and the late Emory Professor George J. Armelagos, who served as mentor to the other authors during their graduate studies.

Zuckerman also delves into how ancient infectious diseases and microbes can be used to address contemporary diseases in an Aug. 1 paper—“Lessons from ancient pathogens”—co-authored with University of Oklahoma Anthropologist Courtney A. Hofman, released in the prestigious journal, Science.

In a recent issue of Scientific Reports—a journal published by Nature—Zuckerman and Hofman address using ancient dental samples as a diagnostic tool as part of their National Science Foundation-funded research into ancient DNA. 

This past year Zuckerman has provided expertise to two national magazines on the ethics of working with human skeletons in teaching students and in research.

In an August 2023 cover story “Who are the keepers of academic skeletons” by Bridget Alex, Zuckerman discusses how modern scholars and students can make amends for unethical practices of the past for gathering human skeletons for teaching and study, and how today’s practices must be guided by dignity and respect.

Zuckerman is part of a longstanding team of archaeologists and other scholars exhuming and learning from past human burials at what now is the campus of the University of Mississippi Medical Center as part of the years-long Asylum Hill Project.

For more details about MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences or the Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, visit www.cas.msstate.edu or www.amec.msstate.edu.

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