Medieval Parchment Yields Ancient Sheeppox Virus DNA, Rewriting Livestock Disease History
Researchers found sheep pox DNA in centuries-old parchment and Bronze Age sheep teeth, showing the virus has threatened livestock for over 3,700 years.
- Researchers at University College Dublin extracted sheep pox virus DNA from ancient parchment manuscripts, revealing the disease has threatened livestock for over 3,700 years.
- An international team analyzed works from across Britain and Europe, including the 1,000-year-old York Gospels and the Corpus Glossary at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge from the Middle Ages.
- By combining manuscript DNA with samples from Bronze Age sheep teeth, the study published in Science Advances found the sheeppox virus genome remained very stable over millennia.
- Understanding how these pathogens evolved helps scientists address modern threats, though there is no evidence that sheep pox can infect humans; the disease causes economic losses through trade restrictions and poor wool quality.
- Libraries and archives globally may hold further genetic traces of past animal disease outbreaks, potentially revealing how pathogens impacted societies during the Middle Ages and beyond.
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"Ancient genomes can help us understand how these pathogens that affect us today evolved," says the lead researcher who discovered DNA traces of a deadly virus that causes smallpox on parchment from medieval manuscripts.
An international team of researchers gained genetic material from the animal skins of the old manuscripts, which made the formation of smallpox disease reconstructable
Medieval Parchment Yields Ancient Sheeppox Virus DNA, Rewriting Livestock Disease History
Medieval scribes bent over vellum. They copied gospels and legal codes. Yet the animal skins they used carried secrets far older than the ink. Scientists have pulled viable genetic fragments of a deadly sheep virus from those very pages. The findings trace sheeppox back more than 3,500 years. They show how a pathogen shaped European agriculture long before anyone recorded its name. The work appears in Science Advances. Researchers from Universit…
The DNA of a dangerous virus that raged thousands of years ago has been found in medieval manuscripts. Scientists have discovered sheep pox DNA in ancient parchment and traced its history back 3,700 <p>years. The virus was found in the Middle Ages manuscripts.</p>
LONDON - Arab Jerusalem: A recent scientific study has revealed that the pages of ancient leather manuscripts may hide more than the texts on which they were written, as they can also preserve genetic traces of diseases affecting animals whose skins were used in the slave industry centuries ago.
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