Historians have long speculated that Europeans introduced smallpox to the Americas, which then killed hundreds of millions of Indigenous peoples. Genetic evidence has recently proved they were onto something.
In a newly published Science study , scientists revisited two mummies recovered from northern Chile in 1990 and performed an advanced DNA analysis of their genomes. The individuals, who presumably died between the late 15th and early 17th centuries, hosted a lost strain of variola viruses that cause smallpox—specifically the kind known to have affected Europeans around the same time period.
“This discovery provides the first molecular…
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