Uncovering the World's Oldest Human Cancer Case.

The earliest evidence of human cancer comes from an early human relative who lived around 1.7 million years ago. This individual, likely of the species Paranthropus robustus or Homo ergaster, lived with a malignant tumor in their left toe bone. The first written record of cancer doesn't show up until much later in the Edwin Smith Papyrus from ancient Egypt, written in 3000 B.C. by Imhotep, an ancient Egyptian mathematician, physician, and architect.