The Vikings had smallpox and may have spread it wherever they ventured, scientists report.
That conclusion stems from an examination of 1,400-year-old Viking skeleton teeth that contained extinct strains of smallpox. The researchers found that the genetic makeup of those strains differed from that of the modern smallpox virus eradicated in the 20th century.
“We already knew that Vikings were moving across Europe and beyond, and now we know they had smallpox,” said lead researcher Eske Willerslev, a zoology supervisor at St. John’s College at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
“People traveling the world quickly spread COVID-19, and Vikings are likely to spread smallpox. Right then, they traveled by boat rather than plane,” added Willerslev.
Historians suspected that smallpox has existed since 10,000 BC, but they had no evidence that it existed before the 17th century.
Sequencing of its oldest known strain showed that it existed during the Viking Age, according to researcher Martin Sikora. He is an associate professor at the Center for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
“While we don’t know for sure if these smallpox strains were fatal and killed the Vikings we tested, they certainly died with smallpox in their bloodstream so we can detect it up to 1,400 years later,” said Sikora. said. “It is also very likely that there will be epidemics before our findings that scientists have not yet discovered DNA evidence.”
Dr. Terry Jones of the Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin Institute of Virology in Germany said there are still many mysteries about smallpox viruses.
“Finding so genetically different smallpox in Vikings is truly remarkable. No one expected these smallpox strains to exist. Smallpox was long believed to be in western and southern Europe regularly in 600 AD, around the start of our samples.” Jones said. .
Researchers have shown, Jones added, that smallpox was also widespread in northern Europe.
“Returning crusaders or other subsequent events are believed to have brought smallpox to Europe first, but those theories may not be correct,” Jones said. “While written accounts of the disease are often ambiguous, our findings delay the date of smallpox’s confirmed existence by a thousand years.”
The findings were published July 23 in the journal Science.
More information
For more information on smallpox, visit the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Copyright 2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.
.
