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Of course, someone will start shaking hands; after all, we thought the coronavirus was new! SARS-CoV-2 is new, coronaviruses are very old. The modern man’s genome stores a lot of important information about our evolution and adaptation to the environment. Our DNA has tens of thousands of years of history. Scientists are studying our genome as a time zone and thus discovered that the coronavirus was already raging in East Asia 20,000 years ago.
An international team of scientists has decided to find out if the COVID-19 pandemic is our first serious encounter with coronavirus.
They reviewed the genetic information of populations in 26 different regions looking for traces of possible coronavirus epidemics. These traces have been found in East Asia: present-day China, Japan, Mongolia, North and South Korea, Taiwan.
The first signs of coronavirus appear to have been visible 25,000 years ago. More clearly, 20 thousand years ago. And this virus did not leave the region for several millennia, some 3,000 years before our era.
Of course, these data are not accurate: scientists understand that even a thousand years of error is possible. Also, they don’t know if it was a coronavirus or several different epidemics.
Asia has already seen epidemics of SARS, MERS, and SARS-CoV-2 in the last 20 years. Therefore, it is likely that 20,000 years ago people suffered from different coronaviruses. They may recur on a regular basis like seasonal flu.
The researchers say this research will help them discover how humans adapt to epidemics and how populations change.
Source: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)00794-6
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