Smallpox has left an unmistakable mark on human history, killing at least 300 million people in the 20th century alone.
pushed genetic evidence for the latest emergence of smallpox back another few years, to some time before 1050 CE.even earlier than this. Descriptions of symptoms resembling those of the disease have been found in 4th-century texts from China, and Egyptian mummies with pockmark scarring also suggest smallpox was circulating some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.
Scientists can still infer a lot about a virus's past and its evolutionary history when they have enough samples to compare. They can see how a virus has changed over time and work out how fast or slow a virus. From there, scientists can wind the 'molecular clock' back to estimate when an ancestral version of the virus likely existed.
This included four ancient VARV genomes from the Viking Age and two historic VARV genomes from the 17th and 18th centuries, along with 48 modern VARV sequences from before smallpox was eradicated in 1980. In their models, they adjusted for the way the rate of viral evolution appears to slow down when looking at longer time spans and speed up over shorter time periods. The most recent common ancestor of all the VARV genomes, they found, dates back to around 3,800 years ago or earlier.– taterapox and camelpox – the analysis also showed that the smallpox virus ancestor split off from its relatives around 7,700 years ago.
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