Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Scientists hunt malaria in ancient Rome cemetery
IN A 1 500-YEAR-OLD Italian cemetery, macabre objects buried with the dead reveal a desperate people fighting one of man’s biggest killers.
Among the bones of infants are puppy skulls, while on top of graves are piles of roof tiles that suggest someone wanted to make sure the dead remained in their graves. The epidemic that swept through the ancient village near the present-day village of Lugnano in Teverina, Italy, was malaria. Archaeologists from the University of Arizona, US, know this because of the chemical signatures left by the disease in ancient bone marrow.
Their discoveries, and those of other academics also working on Roman cemeteries, are helping track the ancient migration route of man’s deadliest disease that even today still kills hundreds of thousands a year. It is a journey more and more academics believe started in Africa.
When the infants died and were buried in the cemetery near Lugnano, the Roman Empire had converted to Christianity. But the panic caused by all these inexplicable deaths is believed to have caused the occupants of that villa to revert to pagan superstition.
The skulls of puppies are believed to have stemmed from the Roman belief that, placed on a child’s stomach, they would draw a fever.
Other scientists have been hunting malaria in Roman cemeteries by looking for its DNA deep in the teeth of the dead. Knowing where malaria was all that time ago, believe the researchers, offers a reference point for when and where the parasite existed in humans, and helps in understanding the evolution of the disease.
“Malaria was likely a significant historical pathogen that caused widespread death in ancient Rome,” said evolution geneticist Hendrik Poinar, director of McMaster’s Ancient DNA Centre, in Canada, who is part of a team that excavated three cemeteries that dated between the 1st and 3rd century AD.
The killer they found was Plasmodium falciparum, which is responsible for nearly 450 000 deaths every year, most of the children victims were under the age of five.
“Being able to have a window to the diversity of ancient microbes can help to understand how a particular causative agent may have evolved or changed over time,” said Stephanie Marciniak, who worked on the study.
“By looking at the extent of these changes in the ancient genome, we can explore how the parasite responded to varied environments from different time periods, which may lead to greater understanding about currently circulating malaria strains.
“There is extensive written evidence describing fevers that sound like malaria in ancient Greece and Rome, but the specific malaria species responsible is unknown.”
Professor Maureen Coetzee, of the Malaria Entomology Research Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand, said it is believed that humans and malaria have had a long relationship, and that the disease probably followed man’s migration out of Africa. It is likely to have jumped species evolving from malaria that infected apes, she said.
“What would be interesting to see is how much genetic variation there is between the parasite found in those Roman cemeteries and today. Genetically, malaria is very plastic,” Coetzee said. She wasn’t involved in the Roman study.
While the Romans appeared to have resorted to superstition to treat malaria, across the globe in Asia, the Chinese used wormwood to fight the disease. It was so effective that Artemisia, a derivative of the plant is used today to treat malaria.