Geneticists identify probable microbe that killed 80% of Mexico’s population

This disease ravished the Americas top to bottom, excepting perhaps the Pacific Northwest.  Inn fact when i first got this blog started i did some calculations particularly in light of the obvious huge amazonian population and concluded that the whole population of the Americas could well have approached 100,000,000 and that it was far better to err on the upside.

At least we now know what it was.  Considering that the Norse also were in contact for at least five centuries prior to the Spanish onset, and that we have an unexplained decline or die off long before, it may well turn out the the Spanish are been unfairly blamed.

With this vector we must also consider that the Norse got it from somewhere as well. What is clear here is that we finally have what we were looking for.

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Geneticists identify probable microbe that killed 80% of Mexico’s population

Posted by Richard Thornton | Jan 17, 2018 | Biology, DNA, Health Issues, History, Mexico | 0 |

Chronology and scale of Mesoamerica’s population decline exactly matches the Lower Southeast.

https://peopleofonefire.com/geneticists-identify-probable-microbe-that-killed-80-of-mexicos-population.html

The Washington Post published a fascinating article this week on genetic research being carried out in Mexico.  One of the great mysteries of the European Contact Period has always been, “What wiped out most of the populations of advanced civilizations in Mesoamerica, the Amazon Basin and Southeastern United States during the 1500s?”

It is known that smallpox killed millions of indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica, plus the Gulf Coast and South Atlantic Coast of the United States in the first decade of the 16th century.  However, a strange disease that the Nahuatl Peoples of Mexico called cocoliztli later killed 85% of the indigenous peoples of the Mexican Highlands, yet had no effect on European colonists or those indigenous peoples living near the coast.  Another one of the cocoliztli plagues killed over 50% of the survivors of the first plague.  The 1585 cocoliztli plague in Mexico coincided with the sudden abandonment of all the large proto-Creek towns in North Georgia and Western North Carolina.

The disease often killed its victims in one day, yet did not have the same symptoms as the bubonic plague or smallpox.  This is what baffled biologists and anthropologists.  Geneticists have analyzed the bones of cocoliztli victims in a Mexican cemetery and found the consistent presence of Salmonella entrica genomes.  Very strangely . . . this disease first appeared in Norway!   To read the full article go to:

The Mesoamerican Holocaust

Déjà vu

Ironically, that you are reading the People of One Fire newsletter today is directly due to Salmonella entrica.  I came down with it during my second evening in Mexico, while starting my fellowship in Mexico many suns ago.   That will be a separate article, where I discuss the symptoms of this disease, human interest aspects of what could have been a catastrophic end to my studies in Mexico before they started, plus the possible implications for understanding the Southeast’s past.

Scientists find possible cause for mystery epidemic that wiped out Mexico 500 years ago

The Washington Post 

Samantha Schmidt 1 day ago

From 1545 to 1548, a mysterious disease killed about 80 percent of the population of Mexico. It was one of the worst epidemics in human history, felling an estimated 5 million to 15 million people, and was known by natives as cocoliztli —  a word meaning pestilence.

About three decades later, cocoliztli struck again, wiping out half of the remaining native population between 1576 and 1578.

“The place we know as New Spain was left almost empty,” wrote a Franciscan friar who witnessed the horrors. “In the cities and large towns, big ditches were dug, and from morning to sunset the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches …”

For more than a hundred years, scientists have sought clues to what may have caused this disease of epic proportions. Some have suspected illnesses such as measles, smallpox or a type of hemorrhagic fever — potentially brought over to Mexico by the Spanish.

Now, using ancient DNA, a team of researchers has for the first time identified a possible cause of the colonial-era epidemic: Salmonella enterica, a pathogen that causes enteric or typhoid fever.

The study, published Monday in Nature Ecology and Evolution, was led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Harvard University and the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History.

 

  © Library of Congress/ Conquistadors from the 16th century as depicted in a painting from the 1700s. Up until now, scientists studying ancient epidemics have been forced to mostly rely on historical descriptions of symptoms, which were subject to cultural biases and inaccuracies. Most infectious diseases are incredibly tough to track on the DNA of skeletal remains.

But using a new computer program, this team of researchers was able to analyze ancient DNA from the teeth of 29 skeletons. Most of the remains were excavated from the only known cemetery linked to the cocoliztli epidemic of 1545 to 1550 AD, a burial site in the Mixtec town of Teposcolula-Yucundaa, in Oaxaca, Mexico. After the epidemic, this city was relocated to a neighboring valley, leaving the epidemic cemetery essentially untouched, according to the study.

A new computer algorithm called MALT allowed scientists to screen broadly for all bacterial DNA in the extracted samples, without specifying a target organism beforehand.

“We could look at anything and everything,” Ashild Vagene, one of the authors of the study, said in an interview with The Washington Post. The program allowed researchers to filter out all environmental DNA, such as fragments from plants or fungi, she said.

Matching up the DNA fragments with a large database containing all known environmental and pathogenic bacterial genomes, the scientists were able to find traces of Salmonella enterica Paratyphi C in 10 of the skeletons.

The study does not identify the precise source of the bacteria. At this point, scientists cannot be certain if it was a pathogen brought over by the Spaniards, or one that originated locally and flourished with the social changes brought by the Europeans.

However, “we believe it is likely that it was brought over by Europeans,” Vagene said, because research indicates this strain type already existed in Norway long before it broke out in Mexico. Moreover, the Nahuatl word and concept cocoliztli only appeared in the native language after the arrival of the Spaniards.

Dr. Francisco Hernández, a lead physician in the Spanish colony, described cocoliztli based on autopsies he performed on the dead:

The fevers were contagious, burning, and continuous, all of them pestilential, in most part lethal. The tongue was dry and black. Enormous thirst. Urine of the colors sea-green, vegetal-green, and black, sometimes passing from the greenish color to the pale. Pulse was frequent, fast, small, and weak — sometimes even null. The eyes and the whole body were yellow. This stage was followed by delirium and seizures. Then, hard and painful nodules appeared behind one or both ears along with heartache, chest pain, abdominal pain, tremor, great anxiety, and dysentery [diarrhea]. The blood that flowed when cutting a vein had a green color or was very pale [and] dry . . .

Vagene said the team of scientists only extracted DNA from one particular burial site, containing victims of one particular wave of the disease. Therefore, further work must be done to find out if DNA at other sites can be traced to Salmonella enterica.

This specific pathogen may be one of several causes for the disease, Vagene said.

“We can only look for pathogens that we know exist today,” she said. “We can’t look for things that we don’t know existed.”

Still, the study marks a first step toward understanding the disease exchange in colonial Mexico. And the MALT program could be used to find causes to other ancient and modern diseases in other periods and parts of the world, Vagene said.

"It’s the first piece of the puzzle to perhaps finding out what caused this epidemic mystery,” she said.