Over the past 20 years, people have faced a series of outbreaks caused by coronaviruses, including SARS, MERS, and Covid-19. But humans may have faced the disease millennia ago, new research suggests.
A team of researchers from Australia and the United States has found evidence of a coronavirus epidemic that broke out more than 20,000 years ago in East Asia, according to a study published in the Current Biology scientific journal on Thursday.
In the study, the researchers studied the genomes of more than 2,500 people from 26 different populations around the world. They pinpointed the earliest interaction of the human genome with coronaviruses, which left genetic imprints on the DNA of modern-day people in East Asia.
The genomes they studied contain evolutionary information about humans tracing back hundreds of thousands of years, said lead author Yassine Souilmi â information weâve only learned to decode in recent years.
Viruses work by making copies of themselves. However, they donât have their own tools to do the duplication. âSo they actually depend on a host, and thatâs why they invade a host and then they hijack their machinery to create copies of themselves,â Souilmi said.
That hijacking of human cells leaves a mark we can now observe â offering concrete evidence our ancestors were once exposed to and adapted to coronaviruses.
Between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago, Homo sapiens came to Southeast Asia and Australia by migrating from Africa, known as the âOut of Africaâ model.
If the East Asian Coronavirus is 20,000 years old, then Asian Homo Sapiens would have been in Southeast Asia for nearly 40,000 years prior to the epidemic.
We never hear or read about coronaviruses outbreaks starting in Africa, but always in the Far East.
Africa has bats so there should have been coronavirus epidemics in Africa as well. I wonder what the link is between East Asia being the center of coronavirus outbreaks throughout humanities history.
What is even more interesting is the fact that coronavirus is devastating, as we have all seen with Covid-19. If a similar outbreak happened prior to modern day medicine and medical technology, the coronavirus outbreak 20,000 years should have wiped out nearly all of humanity, if not all of humanity.
Perhaps coronavirus outbreaks in East Asia can explain why humans didnât really have a footprint on Earth until the Dino Roid made them go extinct. Humans, during the time of the Dinoâs, would probably have kept to the tallest mountains as possible to keep from being consumed by yeah, what was below the green tree canopy, that humans looked down upon from high mountain caves. Possibly, coming down out of the mountains to raid bird nests and to hunt birds. Living in caves, far above the ground and away from the fallout of the meteor, humans could have survived on, once again, bird eggs and birds and even other humans.
Once the devastation had settled, and a new landscape emerged below that wasnât covered as by many trees and nearly not as many dinoâs, humans then wandered down the from mountains and into the plains where their numbers rapidly increased due to the abundance of water and new sources of food. Not to mention, not as many dinos hunting them.
Or the reason that humans survived the epidemics and pandemics of the Pre-Ancient Past could be related to extraterrestrial intervention, that upon seeing the human species being wiped out by the viruses born on Earth, after the meteor killed the dinoâs, the aliens stepped in and vaccinated early humans and gave them very rudimentary tools and knowledge that rapidly advanced the human species from that point on. Because technically, humans should still be running around using rocks and sticks and should be advanced as we are.
Itâs odd that humans didnât progress in 1.8 million years based on the oldest recorded human remains found compared to the sudden advance of human civilization in the past 20,000 years. Its like humans were one day eating snails and moths and crunchy beetles and BRIGHT LIGHT, a carrier emerged from deep space, possibly on a mission of tracking the meteor that impacted Earth.
