First, some background on radioactive elements in nature.

By the nature of radioactivity, the most radioactive (and thus, most dangerous) substances will break down rapidly in the event of their natural formation. This is why miners don’t suffer from Plutonium poisoning, and Technetium can only be created in a lab, and meant that it wasn't until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that radiation poisoning occurred. Uranium and Thorium are different. They are most stable of the radioactive elements by far, with Uranium-238 having a half life of nearly 4.5 billion years and Throium-232 having a half life of over 14 billion. Though Uranium and Thorium are still slightly unstable, they decay at a very slow rate, such that they are not particularly dangerous substances in their own right.

Both Uranium and Thorium play a crucially important role in Earth’s geology, and thus have had an indirect but massive impact on human history, as their radioactive decay generates most of the internal heat of Earth. This heat results in the movement of Tectonic Plates, triggering Earthquakes, Volcanic Eruptions, and Tsunamis, as well shaping the continents and islands of the entire world.

But humans have been directly exposed to radioactive materials well before the discovery of radioactivity in 1885. Uranium is somewhat common in Earth’s crust, at a rate of 2.7ppm, which is higher than that of arsenic, silver, mercury, or gold. Thorium is even more common, at around 9.6ppm, which is even higher than that of tin. As ancient societies developed mining technologies and these fairly rare elements began to see widespread use, they began to interact with radioactive metals more frequently

Today, Thorium is primarily refined from Monazite, which is a valuable source of various other rare earth metals as well. However, monazite by itself had very little practical use to pre-industrial societies—I find no reference to Monazite mining before the later half of the 19th century. Uranium, by contrast, has been used for millennia.

Lignite, a very low grade of coal, contains a small amount of Uranium. The North Dakota Geological Survey found concentrations as high as 0.2% in some North American deposits. Lignite has a long history of human usage, with lignite figurines being found in Germany before the advent of agriculture, and appearing in numerous sculptures and much jewelry across Europe—especially in the Roman Empire.

But the main source of Uranium is in the aptly named Uraninite, an ore largely composed of Uranium dioxide. Uranium Dioxide can be used to make green, black, or yellow tinted glass, which was modestly popular in Early Modern Europe. Starting in the Late Medieval Era, Uraninite, then known as Pitchblend, was widely mined alongside silver in Southern Germany. It was primarily used for glassmaking. ‘Vaseline Glass’ uses a small amount of uranium dioxide to confer a pale yellow-green color, and was quite popular among the upper classes of Victorian England. It wasn’t until the 1940s that Vaseline ceased to be widely sold. Still, unlike the notorious Radium-tinted products of the early 20th century, Vaseline and other uranium containing glasses were not radioactive enough to cause acute poisoning.

Uranium was first recognized as a chemical element in 1789, when chemist Martin Klaproth analyzed German Pitchblend, but its radioactivity was not recognized until 1896, when Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium salts emitted a new form of radiation. For this discovery, he would receive the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, which along with Marie Curie's research into Uranium, Radium, and Polonium, signaled the beginning of the Atomic Age. The uses for natural and artificial radioactive compounds would become more apparent over the course of the 20th century, primarily used in the energy and military sectors.

In conclusion, while uranium has seen limited use since at least the Late Pleistocene, it wasn’t until the early modern era that it started to play a substantial role in society, and not until the 20th century that the full potential of radioactive compounds as fuel was realized. For nearly all of human history, the main influence that radioactivity had on human societies was in causing natural disasters, rather than its industrial applications. Radiation Poisoning is a very modern phenomenon made possible by these new technologies, and it is unlikely that it caused any illness—much less fatalities—until Wilhelm Röntgen received a serious skin burn from X-ray experimentation in 1895.