“That was one of those eureka moments,” he told The Washington Post.

Camarós, a professor of archaeology at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and his team say they found proof that moves forward our understanding of when humans tried to treat cancer by 1,000 years. He and his team published a report Wednesday in the Frontiers in Medicine journal, detailing how they found markings indicating that ancient scientists were trying to remove cancer from a skull.

Cancer was the second-leading cause of death in 2022 in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with 608,000.

Any multicellular life form is at risk of cancer, Camarós said. Even the dinosaurs were prone to cancer.

“If we understand how cancer evolves, we may understand about ourselves,” he said. And if researches can find out how certain cancers changed or vanished, maybe they can better tackle modern-day forms of the disease.

To Camarós, oncology isn’t just about the past 20 years of successful innovation but also about thousands of years of scientific curiosity and trying to understand the disease to improve human lives. And this skull discovery moves everything forward just a bit, he said.

“It’s like witnessing the starting point of something,” he said.

The team was studying the skull to get a better sense of cancer in antiquity when they came across a cut mark from a metallic object near where a tumor had been. It meant that scientists about 4,500 years ago were either trying to treat cancer or were conducting a medical autopsy, both of which are news to historians.

The skull, No. 236, had been in the Duckworth Collection at Cambridge University for years after being found in 20th-century Giza, Egypt. The skull was last studied in the 1960s, when a professor confirmed that the skull had contained cancer, which Camarós said was an advanced discovery at the time.

But technology has changed a lot in six decades.

Camarós, who said he has a passion for oncology and archaeology, instantly wanted to look at the skull in 2021 when he came upon the box that was marked with “cancer” on the outside.

“It was like a magnet for me,” he said.

He and his fellow scientists placed the skull in front of the camera in October 2021.

Camarós said the microscopic technology available in the 1960s didn’t compare with modern digital cameras that can zoom with “almost no limit.”

It would “have been absolutely impossible for us not to see the cut marks,” he said.

Camarós now wants to study the genetics of ancient cancers at the molecular level to answer questions about how the disease may have changed. A big part of that is finding other samples that contain DNA and identifying whether there was cancer present.

“If there is any other case in the future, it will come out because of the technology,” he said.