Volcanic eruptions that dimmed the sun may have left children in 18th-century England with rickets

Of 109 people in a Quaker burial ground in North Shields, England, whose birth years could be estimated, 91 were born within 10 years after a major volcanic eruption. Dr. Ellen Kendall of Durham University reported the pattern in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology on Nov. 5, alongside tooth evidence of vitamin D deficiency. The study links volcanic dimming of sunlight in the Little Ice Age to the childhood rickets that was common in industrializing Britain.

AI, explained every day: The Deep View is the go-to daily newsletter for 600,000+ founders, knowledge workers and professionals who want to stay up to date with artificial intelligence.

Get The Deep View →

We may earn a commission if you sign up.

The cemetery at Coach Lane was used from 1711 to 1829 and excavated in 2010, recovering 236 burials. Because the graves were unmarked, nobody can match a skeleton to a name in the burial register, so the researchers treated the community as a single group.

The Coach Lane register and the count of 91 of 109

The register lists 197 individuals. For 109 of them, birth years could be estimated by subtracting age at death from the year of death, and the Durham-linked release on EurekAlert reports that 91 of those 109 were born within a decade after a major eruption. Another 41 were born when low solar output and volcanic activity overlapped. The paper does not name individual eruptions in the Frontiers summary, referring only to a major volcanic eruption and to periods of heightened activity, so this article cannot list them.

The register gives ages and dates of death but not names, which shapes what any analysis can claim. Estimated birth years put much of the burial population in the decades when volcanic activity and weak solar output kept the Little Ice Age going, and the paper treats the clustering after eruptions as evidence of environmental pressure on children born in those windows.

Dentin defects in 30 teeth from 21 people

For the physical evidence, the team examined 30 teeth from 21 unidentified individuals. Teeth keep a record of how they grew: regularly spaced failures of dentin mineralization, separated by bands of normal dentin, can signal vitamin D deficiency, and in this set the defects mostly formed in infancy and childhood. The release image of such a tooth, credited to Kendall and colleagues, shows multiple scattered bands of dark scalloped defects running down its length.

Rickets is the disease behind those lines, and the NHS describes it as a condition in which a child’s bones become weak and soft, usually from too little vitamin D or calcium. The body makes vitamin D when skin is exposed to sunlight, and in the United Kingdom the sun between September and March is too weak to produce enough, which is why reduced UV in a cooler climate matters to the argument.

Symptoms in a living child include bowed legs, swollen and painful wrists, and being small for age with late tooth development, according to the NHS. Dentin keeps the record of arrested mineralization even after soft tissue and bone have vanished, which is why teeth from an unmarked cemetery can speak to childhood illness that left no written trace.

The count of 91 deserves care in reading. A birth within 10 years after a major eruption covers a window of a decade, and eruptions were frequent enough in the Little Ice Age that a large share of any birth cohort could fall inside such windows by chance. The paper’s strength is the pairing of the register pattern with physical damage in the teeth, since the two lines of evidence are independent: one comes from paperwork, the other from the dentin itself.

Little Ice Age cooling and the industrial town

The Durham-led study sits among growing efforts to read past climate through human remains. The Frontiers write-up describes the Little Ice Age as a cooling stretch between the 13th and 19th centuries, driven by heightened volcanic and low solar activity, that was nearing its end as England industrialized. Rickets was common among children during the Industrial Revolution, roughly 1760 to 1840. The paper’s own name borrows a poetic line about the bright sun being extinguished.

Kendall’s conclusion is that most people buried at Coach Lane lived during periods marked by environmental differences in UV light availability, which the team says could explain the high rates of rickets and dental defects. She said the work felt like a new approach to understanding historical childhood vitamin D deficiency, and the Frontiers announcement carries her full comments; the paper itself sits under the DOI 10.3389/fearc.2026.1909791.

Kendall also described humans as cultural creatures defined by beliefs and the systems they reinforce, a point she uses to argue that illness in the past has to be read through environment and society together rather than through biology alone. What the data cannot show is cause for any single child. With unmarked graves, no record ties a particular defect to a particular birth year, and the 91 of 109 figure is a community-level pattern built on estimated birth dates. How much of the rickets came from lost sunlight, versus coal smoke, indoor work and diet, is the question the study leaves open. Wider analysis could also compare Coach Lane with other British cemeteries from the same decades, which would show whether the post-eruption pattern is local to North Shields or part of a national signal. Until that comparison is made, the 91 of 109 count is best read as a strong clue about one Quaker community, backed by 30 teeth from 21 people, rather than a verdict on the whole country. Kendall’s group stresses that the approach is new, and that is the reason replication at other cemeteries matters before the volcanic link is treated as established fact.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

AI, explained every day: Get The Deep View →

We may earn a commission if you sign up.