One Paleopathology: A Deep-Time Framework for Predicting Malaria Resurgence in the Climate Crisis
Abstract
Malaria, the deadliest vector-borne disease in human history, is resurging under climate change, land-use change, shifting public health priorities, and declining global funding. In this Personal View, we argue that One Paleopathology, an interdisciplinary framework that integrates bioarchaeology, paleogenomics, historical (written) sources, paleoclimatology, and disease ecology, offers critical insights into malaria's climate-driven expansions and contractions over the past 10,000 years. Deep-time evidence shows how anthropogenic environmental modification, from ancient irrigation and urban expansion to wetland management, has shaped transmission dynamics across millennia, and how past communities used biocultural strategies to reduce malaria's burden. We advance two arguments for the framework's value: first, that deep-time analysis reveals how human–environment interactions structure malaria transmission; and second, that past disease outcomes, such as skeletal indicators of malaria and infant and child mortality, can serve as historical baselines to validate and improve predictive models. Integrating reconstructed paleoenvironments, built environments, subsistence and socioeconomic factors, and morbidity and mortality data with climate-informed mechanistic models and an expanded eco-syndemic perspective can strengthen projections of future risk zones. We urge planetary health researchers and policymakers to treat the past as a laboratory, so that surveillance and mitigation in climate-vulnerable regions, from the Mediterranean to the American South, address systemic drivers rather than transient hotspots.
Related
- Predicting the Potential Climatic Suitability of Typical Poisonous Weeds on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau Under Climate Change Using Biomod2 and a Single Global Climate Model
- Predicting Habitat Suitability of Nine Major Grassland Insect Pests in Yunnan, China, Under Climate Change Scenarios
- Climate-driven rodent demography provides a general, transferable basis for predicting arenavirus spillover
- Predicting climate-change impacts on the global glacier-fed stream microbiome
- Integrating MaxEnt and MaxNet for climate-resilient habitat restoration: Predicting the ecological niche of Eucalyptus tereticornis in semi-arid landscapes
BibTeX
@misc{wilson2026paleopathology,
title = {{One Paleopathology: A Deep-Time Framework for Predicting Malaria Resurgence in the Climate Crisis}},
author = {Jordan A. Wilson and Johnny Uelmen and Ellen J. Kendall and David Pickel and Nicole L. Gottdenker and Ana Luisa Santos and Judith Littleton and Timothy P. Newfield and John McNeill and Gwen Robbins Schug and Rebecca L. Gowland and Emily Mendenhall and Jane E. Buikstra},
howpublished = {EcoEvoRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.32942/x26d8n},
url = {https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/15832/},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - One Paleopathology: A Deep-Time Framework for Predicting Malaria Resurgence in the Climate Crisis
AU - Jordan A. Wilson
AU - Johnny Uelmen
AU - Ellen J. Kendall
AU - David Pickel
AU - Nicole L. Gottdenker
AU - Ana Luisa Santos
AU - Judith Littleton
AU - Timothy P. Newfield
AU - John McNeill
AU - Gwen Robbins Schug
AU - Rebecca L. Gowland
AU - Emily Mendenhall
AU - Jane E. Buikstra
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/30
PB - EcoEvoRxiv
DO - 10.32942/x26d8n
UR - https://ecoevorxiv.org/repository/view/15832/
AB - Malaria, the deadliest vector-borne disease in human history, is resurging under climate change, land-use change, shifting public health priorities, and declining global funding. In this Personal View, we argue that One Paleopathology, an interdisciplinary framework that integrates bioarchaeology, paleogenomics, historical (written) sources, paleoclimatology, and disease ecology, offers critical insights into malaria's climate-driven expansions and contractions over the past 10,000 years. Deep-time evidence shows how anthropogenic environmental modification, from ancient irrigation and urban expansion to wetland management, has shaped transmission dynamics across millennia, and how past communities used biocultural strategies to reduce malaria's burden. We advance two arguments for the framework's value: first, that deep-time analysis reveals how human–environment interactions structure malaria transmission; and second, that past disease outcomes, such as skeletal indicators of malaria and infant and child mortality, can serve as historical baselines to validate and improve predictive models. Integrating reconstructed paleoenvironments, built environments, subsistence and socioeconomic factors, and morbidity and mortality data with climate-informed mechanistic models and an expanded eco-syndemic perspective can strengthen projections of future risk zones. We urge planetary health researchers and policymakers to treat the past as a laboratory, so that surveillance and mitigation in climate-vulnerable regions, from the Mediterranean to the American South, address systemic drivers rather than transient hotspots.
ER -