Challenging definitions and diagnostic approaches for ancient rare diseases: The case of poliomyelitis.

Objective: This paper aims to contribute to the definition of ancient rare diseases in skeletons displaying pathologies associated with paralysis. It uses a new suite of methods, which can be applied to challenging cases of possible paralysis in archaeologically-derived human skeletal material, specifically applied to the identification of poliomyelitis.

Materials: An adult male skeleton from Roman Halbturn, Austria.