"The existence of dormant tumour cells was proposed as early as the 1930s, when Australian pathologist Rupert Willis attributed some secondary cancer growths to such cells4. As people who had been treated for cancer began to live longer, he and others noticed that the disease sometimes returned much later, and was often even more aggressive."
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Cancer is a disease of civilization. Meaning - it was very, very uncommon before modern foods (excess consumption of grains, sugars, etc) became common.
An interesting book on this topic by Vilhjalmur Stefansson is, appropriately enough Cancer Disease of civilization?
Published in the early 1900's, he goes through the very detailed records from the first missionaries that lived among the native tribes of Canada. Cancer was completely unknown until maybe the 1930's after they'd had some decades of eating foods like flour and sugar.