Past diseases: present questions and future perspectives from an archaeogenetic approach

The assessment of the health condition of past individuals is a central topic in the study
of ancient populations: both from an archaeological and genetic point of view. The genetic
study of ancient human individuals and human-related environments has already been successfully used to understand the relationship of ancient populations with health and disease. The present article aims to present which are the current explored applications of
archeogenetics in this direction. The article is divided in three sections that group the
major research lines: the direct study of pathogenic data from ancient human remains,
the study of human evolution linked to disease and the study of human related environments. Additionally, the article aims to discuss the potential scope and limitations of this
method.