ArticleScientific reports2026
Book-embedded hair reveals mineral-rich diets among urban commoners in early modern to modern Japan.
Article in Scientific reports, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
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Abstract
Urban populations in early modern to modern Japan depended strongly on rice and marine fish, raising the question of whether such apparently simple diets provided sufficient mineral availability in everyday life. Here, we analyze human hair preserved in historical book covers to reconstruct elemental exposure among urban commoners from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Screening approximately 70,000 volumes allowed individual hair samples to be linked to specific cities and years through colophon records, enabling a rare population-scale reconstruction from abundant and well-dated materials. Multi-element analyses showed that several elements, including essential ones, were consistently higher in historical hair than in contemporary reference populations, indicating greater mineral availability in past diets. Carbon and nitrogen isotope data confirmed strong reliance on C
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