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Using a specialised method to analyse prehistoric disease DNA, researchers have, for the first time, successfully mapped an entire catalogue of infectious diseases, spanning 214 known human pathogens in total, that afflicted prehistoric populations and still circulate today.
The analyses, published in Nature. also provide crucial new insights into the emergence of zoonoses - diseases transmitted from animals to humans, such as plague, leprosy, and yersinosis. The researchers show that many of these diseases first began to appear around 6,500 years ago, which closely coincides with the period when our ancestors started living in close proximity to domesticated animals.
Approximately 70 percent of all new infectious diseases discovered in recent years are zoonotic - that is diseases that can be transmitted from animals to humans. Known zoonoses include diseases such as salmonella, listeriosis, Yersinia enterocolitica (which causes gastrointestinal infection), Borrelia recurrentis (which causes louse-borne relapsing fever), rabies and MRSA.
Astrid Iversen, Professor of Virology and Immunology at University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, and one of the co-authors of the Nature article, said: 'Before 6,500 years ago, we only found DNA from one pathogenic microorganism in the samples from Eurasia, which we could classify as a zoonosis. After that time, zoonoses, to some extent, start causing people to die, and about 5,000 years ago, zoonoses really took off, according to our analyses of ancient human remains.'
The significant increase in the incidence of zoonoses around 5,000 years ago coincides with a migration to north-western Europe from the Pontic Steppe - that is from parts of present-day Ukraine, south-western Russia and western Kazakhstan.
Read the full story on the University of Oxford website.