Seersholm, F. V. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2023

The landscape of ancient human pathogens in Eurasia from the Stone Age to historical times

Infectious diseases have had devastating impacts on human populations throughout history, but important questions about their origins and past dynamics remain1. To create the first archaeogenetic-based spatiotemporal map of human pathogens, we screened shotgun sequencing data from 1,313 ancient humans covering 37,000 years of Eurasian history. We demonstrate the widespread presence of ancient bacterial, viral and parasite DNA, identifying 5,486 individual hits against 492 species from 136 genera. Among those hits, 3,384 involve known human pathogens2, many of which were detected for the first time in ancient human remains. Grouping the ancient microbial species according to their likely reservoir and type of transmission, we find that most groups are identified throughout the entire sampling period. Intriguingly, zoonotic pathogens are only detected [~]6,500 years ago, peaking [~]5,000 years ago, coinciding with the widespread domestication of livestock3. Our findings provide the first direct evidence that this lifestyle change resulted in an increased infectious disease burden. Importantly, they also suggest that the spread of these pathogens increased substantially during subsequent millenia, coinciding with the pastoralist migrations from the Eurasian Steppe4,5.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2022

New insights into 4,000 years of resource economy across Greenland using ancient DNA

The success and failure of past cultures across the Arctic was tightly coupled to the ability of past people to exploit the full range of resources available to them, and to adapt to fluctuations in resource availability. There is substantial evidence for the hunting of birds, caribou and a wide range of marine mammals in pre-historic Greenland from bone remains preserved in ancient middens. However, the extent to which these communities relied on marine resources such as fish and large cetaceans is understudied because of the taphonomic processes and bias that affect how these taxa present themselves in the archaeological record. To address this, we analyse DNA from bulk bone samples from 12 archaeological sites across Greenland dating from Paleo-Inuit to Neo-Inuit periods. Using a combination of metabarcoding and shotgun metagenomics we identify an assemblage of 43 species consisting of birds, fish, and both marine and terrestrial mammals. We find genetic evidence of five different whale species, of which the bowhead whale (Balaena mysticetus) was the most commonly detected. Furthermore, we detect nine fish species, of which four have not previously been identified in any of the studied sites. Lastly, we identify a novel haplotype in caribou (Rangifer tarandus) at the 3,000-year-old site Itinnera, suggesting the presence of a distinct lineage of (now extinct) dwarfed caribou that colonised Greenland after the last ice age 9,000 years ago. Collectively, these findings provide a rare insight into whaling and fishing practices in Greenland and demonstrate that prehistoric Greenlandic communities had the social and technological capacity to target the largest whales available in the waters around them.

paleontology↗