How unearthing diseases’ ancient origins could help produce modern cures | CPT PPP Coverage

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“We see that with syphilis, the plague, and leprosy – whenever humans started to exchange travel and trade, they also brought opportunities for pathogens to travel.”

Conversely, that means that microbial DNA can only tell us so much about the history of ancient pandemics. The DNA itself isn’t a problem. Although DNA does degrade over time, researchers have sequenced the genome of a woolly mammoth who lived one million years ago. However it’s likely that before around 12,000 years ago when humans adopted agriculture and farming, people wouldn’t have come into contact often enough to cause a pandemic.

“You need a certain amount of humans to actually transfer diseases, so we tend to see these diseases appearing alongside the first cities. When people started settling down, that’s when the pandemics struck,” says Schuenemann.

Clues from 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 properly, traps bacteria, eventually causing tooth decay and gum disease. Eventually plaque undergoes a mineralisation process whereupon it hardens, ‘trapping’ the DNA of ancient oral bacteria and viruses inside. Decoding this microbial genome is giving scientists access to a treasure trove 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 Sapienza University of Rome, the team have analysed the tartar of teeth excavated from the medieval cemeteries of St Leonard’s 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 instance, Constantine the African, a famous 11th-Century AD physician, wrote about preparing oral treatments containing ginger and other herbs to alleviate stomach pain triggered by leprosy. Mercury was also found in some patients, which could have been used to cover skin imperfections and as a pain-relieving ointment.

This suggests that rather than simply stigmatising sufferers, victims were cared for.

Diagnosing heart disease and Alzheimer’s

Sequencing dental DNA can do more than tell us about what infectious diseases a person had when they died. In the future, the technology could also reveal what a person’s oral microbiome – the huge and diverse assemblage of bacteria, archaea and fungi that live in and around your mouth – was like too.

This information, in turn, could tell us about the prevalence of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) in ancient times. NCDs are chronic conditions that are not the result of a singular infectious agent. They include conditions like heart disease, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and Alzheimer’s Disease.

“There’s studies going back decades showing how oral health and the oral microbiome are related to these conditions,” says Abigail Gancz, a biological anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University.