(Newser)
– Those Vikings keep making history. Not only did they settle in North America and have warriors, but they apparently suffered from an early type of smallpox: the disease that killed hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century, the New York Times reports. The now extinct strain that appeared on the teeth of Viking remains in northern Europe, dated 600 to 1050 AD; that’s earlier than the first previous case in 1,000 years. “We already knew that Vikings were moving across Europe and beyond, and now we know they had smallpox,” study leader Eske Willerslev of the University of Cambridge told Science Daily. “People traveling the world quickly spread Covid-19 and Vikings are likely to spread smallpox. Right then, they traveled by boat rather than plane.”
The newly discovered strain, taken from remains in the UK, Russia, Norway, Denmark and Sweden, is genetically closer to animal smallpox viruses such as camelpox. The study authors say it did not evolve into smallpox in the 20th century and may not have been fatal. “Maybe it was a mild illness for a time,” writes a smallpox specialist in a study comment. What does it mean to us? Well, smallpox viruses don’t look much like coronaviruses, but the idea of a virus becoming more deadly isn’t very comforting in the COVID-19 age. On the positive side, a global vaccination effort wiped out smallpox in 1980: “Smallpox is the only virus that humans have been able to erase,” Willerslev told the Palace of Justice News Service. “It is an achievement because he was the greatest killer of all known pathogens.” (Read more smallpox stories).
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