Amazing stuff! Here we learn among other things that romantic kissing started in the Bronze age in India, which then may have contributed to the spread of diseases in other parts of the world.
"... In one of the latest studies, researchers uncovered and sequenced ancient herpes genomes for the first time, from the teeth of long-dead Europeans. The strain of herpes virus that causes lip sores in people today — called HSV-1 — was once thought to have emerged in Africa more than 50,000 years ago. But data published in Science Advances on 27 July1 indicate that its origin was much more recent: around 5,000 years ago, during the Bronze Age. ...
The findings hint that changing cultural practices during the Bronze Age — including the emergence of romantic kissing — could have factored into HSV-1’s meteoric rise. ...
The findings hint that changing cultural practices during the Bronze Age — including the emergence of romantic kissing — could have factored into HSV-1’s meteoric rise. ...
Teeth are treasure chests for ancient DNA because of their ability to protect biological molecules from degradation. In the past decade, scientists have used increasingly powerful sequencing technologies to reconstruct the genomes of long-dead humans and animals — the oldest being a mammoth that died 1.6 million years ago — using DNA found in their teeth. ...
In the process, they have also sorted through the genetic material of bacteria and viruses preserved in teeth. Molars, incisors and so on have blood vessels in their roots, so when a person or animal dies, these bones become repositories for whatever pathogens were moving through their bloodstream at the time of death.
The realization that teeth are caches for pathogen DNA has opened the study of ancient diseases ...
In 2013, scientists used DNA extracted from teeth to confirm that the Justinian plague, which swept across the Mediterranean and northern Europe in the sixth century, was the first major outbreak of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis. And in June, a different group of researchers reported that the strain of Y. pestis that launched the Black Death — which killed upwards of 60% of people in some parts of Eurasia in the fourteenth century — probably evolved in what is now Kyrgyzstan, on the basis of DNA from teeth found in that region. ...
And it might also have spread with the growing practice of romantic kissing, which was invented around 3,500 years ago on the Indian subcontinent and was probably later taken up in Europe, during Alexander the Great’s military campaigns in the fourth century. ..."
In 2013, scientists used DNA extracted from teeth to confirm that the Justinian plague, which swept across the Mediterranean and northern Europe in the sixth century, was the first major outbreak of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis. And in June, a different group of researchers reported that the strain of Y. pestis that launched the Black Death — which killed upwards of 60% of people in some parts of Eurasia in the fourteenth century — probably evolved in what is now Kyrgyzstan, on the basis of DNA from teeth found in that region. ...
And it might also have spread with the growing practice of romantic kissing, which was invented around 3,500 years ago on the Indian subcontinent and was probably later taken up in Europe, during Alexander the Great’s military campaigns in the fourth century. ..."
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