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A Bronze Age man buried in a monumental tomb near the Black Sea may have died from a urinary tract infection (UTI) more than five millennia ago, a new study suggests. Archaeologists identified an object the size of a grape corresponding to a kidney or bladder stone in the man’s burial.
“He lived with a chronic urogenital infection”, lead author of the study Natalia Berezinaanthropologist at Lomonosov Moscow State University in Russia, told Live Science in an email.
“It wasn’t a brief episode,” she said. “His last years were probably marked by considerable and more or less constant pain.”
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Berezina and his colleagues studied a small stone-like object found in an Early Bronze Age burial in the Stavropol Upland region of southwestern Russia. They published their results on September 30 in the journal Archaeological and anthropological sciences.
The burial was part of a kurgan cemetery, an ancient steppe burial tradition that involved building a large mound of earth over a grave. Archaeologists discovered a catacomb during their excavation, and inside was the skeleton of a man who was in his 40s when he died around 5,300 years ago. Researchers found a flint arrowhead near the man’s pelvis.
But during laboratory analysis after the skeleton excavation, researchers noticed a strange stone-like object in the collection of hand bones. The brownish object was round with several protrusions and measured about 0.8 inches (2.1 centimeters) in diameter, or about the size of a grape. A small crack in the object showed a crystalline structure inside.
To find out more, the researchers used several analytical methods to determine what the small object was made of. First, X-ray fluorescence analysis revealed that the main components of the object were calcium and phosphorus. Next, they used powder X-ray diffraction analysis to identify the crystal structures.
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In addition to common minerals, researchers discovered the presence of whitlockite, a rare calcium salt known to occur in kidney, bladder and prostate stones. These “stones,” collectively called stones, are hard masses of minerals, such as calcium-containing salts. They differ in terms of the organ in which they form, the exact mechanism of their formation, and their chemical composition, although kidney and bladder stones tend to contain very similar compounds.
Whitlockite is strongly associated with bacterial infections in the human body, suggesting that Bronze Age man suffered from a chronic infection that caused the stone, the scientists concluded.
“In the totality of available evidence, we consider a renal (kidney) stone secondary to a higher chronic disease. urinary tract infection as the most likely origin,” the researchers wrote. That is, the man suffered from chronic or recurrent urinary tract infections, which led to the formation of the stone and likely caused him considerable discomfort. Urinary infections may contribute to kidney stone formation by changing the acidity of urine and making minerals more likely to accumulate.
Researchers aren’t sure why this man had urinary problems or whether it contributed to his death.
Notably, kidney stones can sometimes travel to the bladder, so it is not clear where the stones were located in the man’s body at the time of his death. If the stone had blocked the man’s ureter – one of two long tubes that connect the kidneys to the bladder – it could have caused kidney swelling, secondary infection or sepsis. These conditions were often fatal before the invention of antibiotics.
Other possibilities as to the cause of the stones include a bacterial infection of the man’s prostate or even a sexually transmitted infection.
The man likely moved frequently within this Early Bronze Age steppe society, and other injuries on his skeleton suggested he had a physically demanding life, the researchers wrote. His bones showed that he was well muscled, but he also suffered from degenerative joint diseases in his spine, shoulders, hips, hands and feet. He had a series of healed fractures to his right shoulder, ribs and forearm.
“These were people who worked with cattle and heavy carts in the steppe,” Berezina said, “and the injuries that came from that are the ones we see.” In a previous study In a nearby cemetery, Berezina and his colleagues found the skeleton of a man who had been injured when a cart ran over him several years before his death. “In this context, four healed fractures in our man seem unremarkable,” she said.
But the urinary stones would have made the man’s life difficult, the researchers noted. “This individual suffered from a painful and debilitating chronic urogenital infection, a condition that would have had a significant impact on his quality of life,” they wrote.
Berezina, N. Ya., Statkus, MA, Kalmykov, AA, Abdrashitova, IV, Kolesnik, IV, Platonov, VB, Shashurin, DA, Garmay, AV, Korobkova, VV, Ryleeva, VS, and Gresky, J. (2026). Urolithiasis in the Early Bronze Age in the North Caucasus: a paleopathological case study and insight into ancient lifestyles. Archaeological and anthropological sciences18(10), 209. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02574-7
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