RESEARCHERS at the University of Bradford have been carrying out pioneering work examining the bodies of children who died more than 160 years ago.

For the first time, archaeologists have used small ear bones to discover more about the health of women and children in Victorian Britain.

The scientists from the University of Bradford have examined ear ossicles taken from the skeletons of 20 children, excavated from an 18th and 19th Century burial ground in Blackburn, Lancashire.

The ossicles are tiny bones in the middle part of the ear, most commonly known as the hammer, anvil and stirrup, and are among the smallest bones in the body.

The remains were chosen to represent those with and without dietary diseases, such as rickets and scurvy.

The new method has provided a new link between the diet of the children’s mothers pre-pregnancy and during the later period of pregnancy, which is found in the earliest tooth tissue.

It provides information on the health of the mother and baby in the first two trimesters of a pregnancy.

After being excavated by Headland Archaeology, the remains of these children were examined at the University of Bradford by Masters Student Tamara Leskovar, under the supervision of Dr Julia Beaumonth, a lecturer in Biological Anthropology with more than 30 years experience in dentistry.

Building on previous research done by Dr Beaumont using teeth, the team identified a person’s ossicles can provide a correlation between diet and physiology - the way a human body or its parts function.

It has the potential to identify children at risk of disease in later life, and to study maternal and infant health in ancient populations.

Dr Julia Beaumont said: “Our previous research has shown that teeth can tell us a lot more than people think.

“What we didn’t realise is just how much one of the smallest bones in the body, our ear ossicle, can also tell us.

“It is formed early on, when the child is in the womb and finishes developing in the first two years.

“Unlike other bones, it then doesn’t remodel, therefore providing a unique snapshot of the health of the mother during the early stages of pregnancy.

“This is the first time human ear bones have been used to investigate diet in the womb.

“This will allow us, in combination with the dentine, to work out the health of childbearing women who because of the slow rate of bone turnover have been invisible to us.”

The research was in-part funded be a grant from the Society for the Study of Human Biology and was co-authored by Suzanne McGalliard, from Edinburgh -based Headland Archaeology.

The research has been published in a paper titled ‘Auditory Ossicles: A potential biomarker for maternal and infant health in utero’, which has been featured in the Annals of Human Biology journal.