http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39859965/ns/technology_and_science-science

My hypothesis is that they used it as a sexual stimulant. A similar material from another uricotelic organism, Gallus gallus is a very powerful nitric oxide source when moistened with water. NO is important in the human sexual response for both genders.

On a more serious note, the Egyptians were more “advanced” than we tend to think they were. (Insofar as anybody is advanced, anyway.) They did bathe, though mostly they preferred to use massive amounts of perfume. (And they were rather inventive in finding ways to apply it, such as wearing a wax cone suffused with perfume, which would slowly melt over the course of an evening, releasing its fragrance.) As far as cancer being a product of modern contaminants, I don’t think anyone who knows anything about ancient Egypt could claim they were free of such things. They were among many ancient civilizations who had discovered the use of certain lead compounds as a cosmetic. (And they spent a LOT on cosmetics. Looking good was clearly important.)

Finding tumors in a mummy would be challenging. It’s worth pointing out how much controversy there has been merely over the cause of Tutankhamun’s death — and his mummy was quite well preserved. (For the most part. The brain removal appears to have been bungled somewhat.) The mummification process would make diagnosis of anything very challenging. As Dr Novella points out, there’d be no way to diagnose leukemia. And then there are the organs….

Fred Cunningham:

Didn’t most Egyptian mummies have their internal organs removed.

Most of them, yes. This was in large part to prevent decay. The brain was removed via the nose and then discarded. (The Egyptians did not believe it was important.) The heart was removed and placed into a canopic jar. The lungs were removed and placed into another jar. The guts went into a third jar, and the liver into a fourth. I’m not sure where the remainder went; they may have been either left in situ or discarded. The body cavity was then stuffed, and not merely to retain its shape — it was filled with a mixture including nacre to dry out the body. Most of the mummification process consisted of carefully drying out the body over a period of about two and a half months. It was done slowly so that the skin could be kept supple to avoid tearing during this process. The organs in the canopic jars were also dried, and buried with the mummy on the assumption that these particular organs were important and would be required in the afterlife.

Other studies have made claims such as that the Egyptians must have had trade with the Americas, because traces of cocaine were found on a mummy. The possibility of contamination (even by one of the staff) was never considered, despite the total lack of any other evidence for such a trade. Because of that alone, I am inclined to be a bit skeptical of this study.

They go on to say they looked for evidence in fossils — well, first of all, fossils are notorious for not preserving everything (hey, Quetzalcoatlus northropi, whose holotype is just a wing fragment, has no evidence of ever having had eye cancer!). Secondly, even if a bone tumor was preserved, what are the odds anyone would recognize it for what it was? There are quite a few species known from only fragments, and this makes it difficult to judge what those fragments were *supposed* to look like. Dracorex, a pachycephalosaur known from a single skull fragment (and believed by some scientists to be a juvenile pachycephalosaur) has an amazingly bumpy skull. Is this a trait of its species? Is this something it would grow out of? Or did it have some kind of bone disease? There’s really no good way to tell unless we find more of them. (Assuming we can even tell that we’ve found more of them.) And this is true of more species than people realize.

I would submit that what these people have found is, at best, evidence that they have not found cancer among mummies or fossils. (About the historical record, they are obviously mistaken, so I suspect they did not look very hard. Cancer is not a modern disease.) I also have to question the logic of their conclusion. Cancer is a modern disease? Why? Why would a disease suddenly spread throughout so many different orders of Animalia in such a short period of time? Dogs get cancer. Wild animals get cancer. (Big Mouth the beluga had cancer when he was first captured — hence his name. Poor guy.) Even sharks get cancer. So it can’t be a lifestyle thing; it covers too wide a range. Pollutants? Well, pollutants aren’t really tied to the modern period either. Some manmade pollutants (such as soot, which also occurs in nature) predate recorded history. Esophageal cancer can be provoked by one’s own digestive acids; it beggars the imagination to think that no one in ancient times could have suffered from it. And there are enough carcinogens completely out of human control that cancer cannot be a modern thing. Solar radiation, radon gas (especially in areas with a great deal of granite), cosmic radiation, pollution from volcanoes, pathogens which trigger cancer such as the human papilloma virus…. And most cancers are not immediately lethal. You’d have to live long enough first.

If they had argued that cancer has been aggravated by modern conditions, I might think they had a point. But it is highly implausible that cancer was completely nonexistant, especially as a number of known causes do not depend on modern lifestyles or manmade pollutants.

I agree the research is not easy, or I would have already done it. It is the implementation that would be easy once the research shows it is correct.

Your “belief” does not make it so. Look at the evidence and stop having “beliefs.” If there really is something to this, and its a no brainer and easy to do, then do the research already. The problem is that it isn’t easy and the plausibility is very low. Its not like the countries who shower the most have the shortest life spans… in fact the correlation goes opposite to what you are proposing. And there is a cost… If you think not showering is not hard then you haven’t been around a person who doesn’t bathe.

It is something that is pretty easy to fix and doesn’t have any adverse effects and is not “hard” like exercise or changes to diet, which are so “hard” that people can’t do them, no matter how “easy” they seem. It also has other beneficial effects. If it had even a small effect on incidence of cancer, it would be a no-brainer to do. If the risk is zero, even tiny benefits make it worth doing.

http://books.google.com/books?id=a3mwmXzpsjkC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA103#v=onepage&q&f=false

There are so many risk factors that we know of with breast cancer that your “shower” hypothesis doesnt even make the top 100. “Undeveloped” world is a poorly defined term at best. The following are known factors that have been shown to affect the likelihood of developing breast cancer that could easily explain differences between different countries:
Genetic differences particularly BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations, number of prgnancies over a lifetime, different rates and durations of breast feeding, access to hormone therapy, alcohol consumption, being overweight/obese, dietary fat intake, physical activity rates… just to name a few

These are just the significant ones that I can think of… there are many more. Note that women in the “undeveloped” world are more likely to have less risk factors on average by lifestyle alone. Why think of the most obscure reason for something that has so many known explanations?