A new paper in Nature concludes from ancient DNA that while infectious diseases were common in humans since the hunter-gatherer era, that there was a real surge, not at the time of the Neolithic Revolution, but when steppe herders started to invade and conquerer farmers, and hunter-gatherers, possibly because they lived more closely with their animals and because the diseases that they carried helped facilitate their conquests. The New York Times also discusses the paper.
Infectious diseases have had devastating effects on human populations throughout history, but important questions about their origins and past dynamics remain. To create an archaeogenetic-based spatiotemporal map of human pathogens, we screened shotgun-sequencing data from 1,313 ancient humans covering 37,000 years of Eurasian history. We demonstrate the widespread presence of ancient bacterial, viral and parasite DNA, identifying 5,486 individual hits against 492 species from 136 genera. Among those hits, 3,384 involve known human pathogens, many of which had not previously been identified in ancient human remains. Grouping the ancient microbial species according to their likely reservoir and type of transmission, we find that most groups are identified throughout the entire sampling period. Zoonotic pathogens are only detected from around 6,500 years ago, peaking roughly 5,000 years ago, coinciding with the widespread domestication of livestock. Our findings provide direct evidence that this lifestyle change resulted in an increased infectious disease burden. They also indicate that the spread of these pathogens increased substantially during subsequent millennia, coinciding with the pastoralist migrations from the Eurasian Steppe
Martin Sikora, et al., "The spatiotemporal distribution of human pathogens in ancient Eurasia" Nature (July 9, 2025).
No comments:
Post a Comment