The world's oldest cancer is 11,000 years old -- and contagious

"Scientists have finally unlocked the sequence of the world's oldest surviving cancer — an 11,000-year-old, sexually-transmitted genital cancer that still affects dogs today.

Scientists from the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, led by Elizabeth Murchison, published the new research in Science. The cancer first arose in a single dog over 11,000 years ago, and has been passing around among dogs ever since, although scientists didn't know that when they first started out. They simply knew that it was a very old cancer. To get their first hints of its age, they pored through old veterinary literature, and were able to find records of it existing all the way back in 1810."

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Amazing!!