Scientists studying ancient manuscripts, including the 1,000-year-old York Gospels, have identified traces of a deadly sheep virus whose history extends back more than 3,700 years. The research, published in the journal Science, found viral DNA preserved in the parchment pages of historic books, offering an unexpected window into ancient disease outbreaks. According to the team, the virus has remained remarkably unchanged over millennia, suggesting a long evolutionary stasis that surprised researchers who expected to find significant genetic drift across such an extended period.
The findings demonstrate that historic parchment can serve as an inadvertent biological archive, recording outbreaks that occurred centuries before modern virology existed. Scientists extracted viral genetic material from the pages, which were made from animal skins, and compared it with modern strains to reconstruct the pathogen's history. The research offers new insight into how livestock diseases spread and persisted across civilizations, and it highlights the potential for museum collections and archives to contribute to infectious disease research. The team cautioned that further study is needed to determine how widely such traces survive in other historical documents.
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