NYTimes: Viking Age Smallpox Complicates Story of Viral Evolution

The evolution of the deadliest virus in human history — smallpox — is only partly understood. Like the novel coronavirus and many other disease-causing viruses, smallpox seems to have originated in animals, probably rodents, and spilled over to humans, probably thousands of years ago. In the 20th century alone it killed hundreds of millions of people.

Until now, the earliest confirmed case of smallpox had been found in the mummified remains of a Lithuanian child from the 17th century. On Thursday, an international team of researchers pushed that date back 1,000 years, reporting in the Science journal that they had recovered smallpox DNA from the remains of people in Northern Europe in the Viking Age.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/science/smallpox-vikings-genetics.html?referringSource=articleShare


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