When people started wearing woolen clothing, a nasty bacterium saw a new chance to spread

The rise of woolen clothing in prehistory has offered new opportunities to a nasty pathogen. The cause of the ‘recurring fever’ (Febris Recurrens) was transferred until that time by a certain type of tick. But in the period from 6,000 to 4,000 years ago, sheep cultivation for the coat arose in West Asia and people started wearing woolen clothing.

And precisely then the pathogenic tick bacterium will be undergone Borrelia Duttoni A spin -off that will specialize in transfer by a completely different animal: the human clothes (body sluice), which much prefers to live in woolen clothing than in clothes of vegetable fibers such as flax or hemp. Since then, the potentially deadly disease has been ‘recurring fever’ in a tick and a louse variant.

This is all evident from analysis of the DNA of these two bacterial types, Borrelia Recurrentis (Luis) and Borrelia Duttoni (Teek). An important role in this plays the analysis of four louse bacteria-taken from Paleo-DNA from English graves from 500 to 2,000 years old. The research report is on Thursday Science Published.

The ‘new’ Luis bacterium, Borrelia Recurrentiscauses almost the same disease in people as the drawing variant, but can only survive in the body lock, no longer on the tick. This bacterium might be responsible for the European ‘Sweat Fever’ epidemic in the sixteenth century. Characteristic of the disease Is a high fever of a few days that returns after a week, with the drawing variant eleven times, a little less often at the louse variant. The high fever can lead to heart and liver failure and even to acute death.

Ethiopia and Sudan

Due to hygiene measures, the louse variant of the ‘recurring fever’ has now almost completely disappeared from Europe, but it still prevailed there during the world wars. It is still an important fatal disease in Ethiopia and Sudan. The drawing variant is more common worldwide, especially in warmer regions. The causative agents are related to the bacterial species that cause syphilis and Lyme disease.

That between 6,000 and 4,000 years ago, around the start of the Bronze Age, woolen clothing became popular in West Asia is certainBut it is unclear whether the ‘sheep cultivation around the coat’ started on the steppes of Ukraine (with the famous Yamnaya culture, which also forms the most likely origin of Indo-European languages) or earlier in the organized cities of Mesopotamia. From about 10,000 years ago, sheep were kept around the meat.

The oldest archaeological finds of woolen clothing come from Iran, around 5,000 years old, and from the north of the Caucasus, around 4,800 years old. From about 6,000 years ago, more rams were clearly held in the Middle East, which give more and better wool than ewes. And from around 4,500 years, the Proto-Indo-European word for ‘fur’ also seems to mean wool. Interestingly enough, that word on the word used for wool in the languages ​​of the Middle East, such as Sumeric and Akkadian in that period. But whether that similarity indicates a borrowing, one or the other way, is not clear.

To share

Mail the editors