We know that Covid-19’s rapid spread can be attributed to the sheer levels of mobility in this day and age, with millions of planes, trains, boats and other forms of transport ferrying people around, but what about 4,000 years ago?
A bio-archaeologist from the University of Otago in New Zealand has now shed light on this.
Melandri Vlok, a PhD candidate, looked at a disease called “yaws”, which in fact still exists today.
It is caused by the same bacteria that causes syphilis and is a childhood disease that causes highly infectious skin lesions.
It is spread via touch from person to person and causes severe bone disfigurement.
While the disease itself can be cured in the early stages, the bone disfigurement it causes is permanent - and to this day the disease has not been eradicated.
Four millennia later, there are still about 30,000 people who have it in the Western Pacific.
In the 1930s, there was a global attempt to eradicate it, and then a “new attempt was curtailed by the Covid-19 outbreak”, according to Vlok.
A far cry from the world of planes, trains and automobile, Vlok explored a world in which “the friction zone” was where ancient agricultural people met hunter-gatherer people.
Two years ago, she travelled to Vietnam to study skeletal remains from the Man Bac archaeological site, which are now housed in the Hanoi Institute of Archaeology and which had never before been studied for signs of evidence of yaws.
Her research shows that “yaws was introduced to hunter-gatherers in present-day Vietnam by an agricultural population moving south from modern-day China”.
Vlok says the length of time the disease has existed in the region is relevant when addressing how hard it has been to eradicate.
Archaeology like this is the only way to document how long a disease has been with us and been adapting to us.
“This matters because knowing more about this disease and its evolution changes how we understand the relationship people have with it. It helps us understand why it’s so difficult to eradicate. If it’s been with us thousands of years it has probably developed to fit very well with humans.”
This year’s Covid-19 pandemic has focused people’s attention on infectious diseases, and there are lessons to be learned from the past, Vlok says.
“Archaeology like this is the only way to document how long a disease has been with us and been adapting to us. We understand with Covid-19 today how fantastic that disease is at adapting to humans. And Treponema has been with us for so much longer.
“So this shows us what happens when we don’t take action with these diseases. It’s a lesson of what infectious diseases can do to a population if you let them spread widely. It highlights the need to intervene, because sometimes these diseases are so good at adapting to us, at spreading between us.”
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