Science has proof that Neanderthals had common colds which is older than humans. The malady that includes symptoms of sneezes and runny noses have been causing inconvenience to humans in the last 500,000 years with no definite cure.
This is what researchers are saying that it has been present for 500,000 years which inflicted ancient hominids to modern humans as well. It might be assumed that mankind and its forbears have been sniffling ever since.
How the colds developed more than 700,000 years ago is not known yet. Humans and the cold virus are together ever since.
Sneezies have bothered even cavemen
The proof of this claim was drawn from DNA which had remnants of the adenovirus C, on a couple of 31,000-year-old teeth. it gives the impression that viruses linked to the common cold had been bothering humans for a long time reported Daily Mail.
In 2019, the teeth were found in a Siberian archeological dig. Later, the samples were examined by Danish microbiologists at the Copenhagen University. Microscopic strains were present in human infections that included human adenovirus C and herpes simplex-1 that causes cold sores.
This was the first sample of viral infection suffered by humans and prior proof of a virus linked to human sapiens way back to 7000 years.
This study was done by scientists, who posted their work which is not peer-reviewed in pre-print site BioRXiv. It contrasts with an archaic adenovirus strain to its modern descendants that gave a clue how their forbears developed 487,000 and 963,000 years ago. But it might be older at 702,000 years old!
Holtsmark Nielsen, lead of the study remarked they might have found the oldest virus know to humanity. Neanderthals had common colds which are older than humans based on the evidence.
For example, the hepatitis B virus was prevalent in the Bronze Age said a 2019 study in the Journal Nature. The virus was detected in 4,500-year-old remains found in Mongolia. Other cases of bacterial infections like the earliest case of tuberculosis were dated 17,000 years back to a Wyoming Bison.
Humans had tuberculosis about 5,000 years ago which was found in an Egyptian mummy's spine. Nielsen and co-scientists used DNA from a 31,000-year-old baby teeth sample near the Siberian Yana River.
Ancient North Siberians
According to Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at Cambridge University, finding the remains of the ancient ethnic group is important to human evolutionary history. This group of people branched out to modern-day Asians and Europeans.
When the Neanderthal and Denisovan were still existing, they had this adenovirus C and might have bothered a sniffling Erectus said Lead author Martin Sikora, a researcher with the University of Copenhagen.
He added that the Ancient North Siberians knew how to live in their difficult climate. They still survived and were nomadic people.
The scientists from Denmark examined the Yana teeth and saw degraded genetic traces of four species of herpes virus. Also, present were higher-quality samples of human adenovirus C.
Furthermore, the common cold virus was supposed to start infecting humans as far as 200,000 years back in pre-history. It included the most ancient to modern strains which were nuisances until present.
One scientist, Caitlin Pepperell, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that sometimes DNA can be scrambled over time. But she lauded the study as a breakthrough discovery.
