Uncovering the World's Oldest Human Cancer Case.

The oldest known case of cancer in a hominin is a malignant tumor found in a 1.7 million-year-old toe bone of an early human relative discovered in South Africa. The tumor was identified as an osteosarcoma, an aggressive form of bone cancer. The first written record of cancer dates back to 3000 B.C. in the Edwin Smith Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian textbook about bodily trauma and surgical procedures, which included several case studies on breast cancer.