Martha Christina (@Zero60)

Vikings carried the oldest smallpox ever confirmed. In 2020 a team led by scientists at Cambridge and Copenhagen pulled the DNA of the variola virus straight from the teeth of Viking-age skeletons. They found it in 11 people buried across Denmark, Norway, Russia, Britain and the Swedish island of Öland, and rebuilt four near-complete viral genomes from the bones. That pushed the proven existence of smallpox back by a thousand years, to around 600 AD. People used to blame Egyptian mummies or returning crusaders, but no one had ever found hard genetic proof this old until they looked in Viking teeth. The strain was not the smallpox we know. It belonged to an extinct early branch of the virus, very different from the one that killed roughly 300 million people in the twentieth century before it was wiped out in 1980. Whether this older version was a killer or something milder, no one can say yet. What is certain is that these people died with it in their blood. The researchers think Viking ships, moving between trading towns, helped carry it across Europe. Smallpox hid in their teeth for a thousand years before anyone could prove it. What else do you think is still waiting in old bones? #vikinghistory #smallpox #norsehistory