According to a study, a coronavirus epidemic would have occurred 20,000 years ago

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In the last 20 years, people have faced a number of epidemics caused by coronaviruses, including SARS, MERS and Covid-19. But people may have faced a coronavirus epidemic 20,000 years ago, new research suggests, CNN reports, according to Hotnews.
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 recently published in the scientific journal Current Biology.
In the study, researchers studied the genomes of more than 2,500 people in 26 different populations around the world. They identified the earliest interaction of the human genome with coronaviruses, which left genetic fingerprints on the DNA of modern people in East Asia.
The genomes they studied contain evolutionary information about humans hundreds of thousands of years ago, said study lead author Yassine Souilmi, information scientists have only learned to decode in recent years.
Viruses work by making copies of themselves. However, they do not have their own tools to achieve this duplication. “So they actually depend on a host and that’s why they invade a host and then hijack their tools to create their own children,” Souilmi said.
This hijacking of human cells leaves a mark that we can see now – providing concrete evidence that our ancestors were once exposed and adapted to coronaviruses.
In genomes, researchers have discovered these genetic signals related to a coronavirus in five different populations in China, Japan and Vietnam. The epidemic may have spread beyond these countries, Souilmi added, but data are not available in other parts of the region, so it is unknown.
In these populations, Souilmi said the researchers found that a group affected by the epidemic developed a beneficial mutation, which helped protect them against coronavirus. Those with the mutation had an “advantage” for survival, he said – that is, over time, the population was made up of more people with that mutation than without.
“Over a long period of time and over exposure, this leaves a very, very clear mark in the genomes of their offspring,” Souilmi said. “And this is the fingerprint we actually use to detect this old epidemic and also the timing of this ancient epidemic.”
The study said the disease appeared separately between different regions and spread to East Asia as an epidemic.
However, scientists do not know how people lived through the epidemic, in part because it was unclear if it was something seasonal like a flu or continuous – such as the Covid-19 pandemic – that continues to spread and infect all the time.

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