Classical paleoparasitology based on coprolite rehydration and microscopic analysis after parasite concentration techniques is still contributing to the knowledge of parasitc disease past distribution throughout ancient times. But new techniques point to new perspectives, more sensible and capable to detect parasite traces in archaeological remains to the level of DNA fragments. Molecular paleoparasitology constitutes a powerful tool to the research of parasitic diseases in the past. During the last ten years infectious diseases started to be diagnosed using technologies based on nucleic acid. Chagas disease is an excelent example for the development of this technique applied to the diagnosis of a parasitic infection in prehistorical times.
Mummies are a scarce remain of ancient cultures, but bones can be found more abundantly.
Moreover, they are in most of the cases the only available material for analysis. One or two mummies or a handfull of bones found to be positive for some infection may indicate a infectious disease in a population, but rather a paleoepidemio-logical approach. What is possible now with the molecular paleoparasitology is the possibility of investigating significative samples of a skeleton population where traces of a parasite were not visible to a microscopic level. Origin, dispersion, virulence, and pathogenicity will certainly be more clearly understood under molecular paleoparasitological approaches.