A team of scientists has obtained traces of hepatitis B in DNA from humans who lived about 4,500 years ago, dating from the Bronze Age, thus finding the oldest evidence of hepatitis B announced to date.
The scientific portal Science Alert cataloged this finding on Wednesday as the oldest testimony of the existence of this virus. The latest evidence, which was announced earlier this year, was only four and a half centuries old and was detected in the remains of a child who lived in medieval Italy.
Geneticist Eske Willerslev, of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues at the University of Cambridge discovered the new test in the genomes of 304 individuals who lived between 7,000 and 200 years ago and found evidence of hepatitis B infection in 25 of those individuals.
The study has also revealed that a possible migration route to the devastating plague of Justinian, which devastated the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century, originated in Mongolia.
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