Researchers Discover Evidence of a Major Coronavirus Epidemic 20,000 Years Ago

SciTech Daily  October 4, 2021
An international team of researchers (Australia, USA – University of Arizona, UC San Francisco) applied evolutionary analyses to human genomic datasets to recover selection events involving tens of human genes that interact with coronaviruses that likely started more than 20,000 years ago. Multiple lines of functional evidence support an ancient viral selective pressure, and East Asia is the geographical origin of several modern coronavirus epidemics. An arms race with an ancient coronavirus, or with a different virus that happened to use similar interactions as coronaviruses with human hosts, may thus have taken place in ancestral East Asian populations. By learning more about our ancient viral foes, their study highlights the promise of evolutionary information to better predict the pandemics of the future. Modern human genomes contain evolutionary information tracing back tens of thousands of years which may help identify the viruses that have impacted our ancestors—pointing to which viruses have future pandemic potential…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE 

Graphical abstract. Credit: Current Biology, June 24, 2021