In a stunning breakthrough that has considerable implications for the current day, scientists have shown that a coronavirus epidemic ravaged East Asia 25,000 years ago. The study published inCurrent Biologyin June was titled, “An ancient viral epidemic involving host coronavirus interacting genes more than 20,000 years ago in East Asia.”
The research team was led by Yassine Souilmi, of the University of Adelaide Australian Centre of Ancient DNA, along with scientists based in the United States. . The study highlights that a coronavirus similar to the SARS-CoV-2 currently ravaging the world, with 191 million people infected and claiming over 4.1 million lives, afflicted humanity many millennia ago.
The researchers found strong suggestion that 42 coronavirus interacting proteins (CoV-VIPs) in East Asian populations interacted with an ancient coronavirus about 900 generations ago—that is, approximately 25,000 years ago. This pattern was unique in East Asian populations.
The scientists examined thousands of genomes in the 1000 Genomes Project database across 26 populations around the world for signs that a coronavirus had infected humans in the past.
The study found evidence that a previously unknown ancient coronavirus infected people in China, Japan and Vietnam.
