古代DNA揭示天花如何抵达美洲

“Landmark” paper finds European contact introduced the disease LIZZIE WADE Sometime around the turn of the 17th century, two people died in northern Chile. Their disease- ravaged bodies were bundled in layers of textiles, buried in an Indigenous cemetery, and naturally mummified by the desert environment. Now, scientists have identified their killer: smallpox. The virus’ genome found in their bones and described on p. 504 represents the first molecular evidence of the disease in the colonial Americas, confirming histori- cal accounts of the disease arriving with European contact and eventually killing millions of Indigenous inhabitants. “This paper is a landmark,” says Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneti- cist at McMaster University who wasn’t involved with the work. …