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“We see that with syphilis, plague, and leprosy—whenever people began to exchange travel and trade, they also brought opportunities for pathogens to travel.”
Conversely, this means that microbial DNA can only tell us so much about the history of ancient pandemics. The DNA itself is not the problem. Although DNA degrades over time, researchers have sequenced the genome of a woolly mammoth that lived a million years ago. However, it is likely that before about 12,000 years ago, when humans adopted farming and agriculture, humans would not have come into contact often enough to cause a pandemic.
“You need a certain amount of people to actually transfer diseases, so we tend to see these diseases appear along with the first cities. When people started to settle, that’s when the pandemic hit,” Schuenemann says. .
Data from the teeth
A great place to look for ancient microbial DNA is dental plaque. This sticky residue, which builds up on your teeth if you don’t brush them properly, traps bacteria, eventually causing tooth decay and gum disease. Eventually the plaque undergoes a mineralization process where it hardens, ‘trapping’ the DNA of ancient oral bacteria and viruses inside. Decoding this microbial genome is giving scientists access to a wealth of information about the health of our ancestors.
For example, the multinational Medical Project is using human dental plaque to piece together the history of how leprosy was treated during the Middle Ages in Europe. Led by Emanuela Cristiani from Rome’s Sapienza University, the team analyzed dental tartar excavated from the medieval cemeteries of Saint Leonard in Peterborough, England, and Saint-Thomas d’Aizier, in France.
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The team found traces of ginger in some individuals, suggesting that attempts were made to treat the condition. For example, Constantine the African, a famous physician of the 11th century AD, wrote about preparing oral treatments containing ginger and other herbs to relieve stomach pains caused by leprosy. Mercury was also found in some patients, which may have been used to cover skin blemishes and as an ointment for pain relief.
This suggests that rather than simply stigmatizing the sick, the victims were cared for.
Diagnosing heart disease and Alzheimer’s
Dental DNA sequencing can do more than tell us what infectious diseases a person had when they died. In the future, the technology could also reveal what a person’s oral microbiome was like—the large and diverse collection of bacteria, archaea, and fungi that live in and around your mouth.
This information, in turn, can tell us about the prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in ancient times. NCDs are chronic conditions that are not the result of a single infectious agent. They include conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease.
“There are studies going back decades showing how oral health and the oral microbiome are linked to these conditions,” says Abigail Gancz, a biological anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University.
