Coronavirus epidemic first hit over 21,000 years ago: Study

The most recent common ancestor of sarbecoviruses the family of coronaviruses to which SARSCoV belongs existed more than 21000 years ago nearly 30 times older than previous estimates finds a studyThe study published in the journal Current Biology showed that humanity may have been exposed to sarbecoviruses which has the potential to jump from animals to humans since the Paleolithic period roughly 25 million years ago to 10000 BCDespite having a very rapid rate of evolution over short timescales to survive viruses must remain highly adapted to their hosts this imposes severe restrictions on their freedom to accumulate mutations without reducing their fitnessThis causes the apparent rate of evolution of viruses to slow down over time The new research for the first time successfully recreates the patterns of this observed rate decay in virusesAlso Read If new variants donrsquot form there will be no new waves International medical expertsThe researchers developed a new method that can recover the age of viruses over longer timescales and correct for a kind of evolutionary relativity where the apparent rate of evolution depends on the timescale of measurementOur estimate based on viral sequence data of more than 21000 years ago is in remarkable concordance with a recent analysis on human genomic dataset that suggests infection with an ancient coronavirus around the same time said Mahan Ghafari from Oxford UniversityThe study also demonstrates that while existing evolutionary models have often failed to measure the divergence between virus species over periods from a few hundred to a few thousands of years the evolutionary framework developed in this study will enable the reliable estimation of virus divergence across vast timescales potentially over the entire course of animal and plant evolutionBesides SARSCoV2 The new model also enables reconstructing the evolutionary history of RNA and DNA viruses during more remote periods in the pastThe model predictions for hepatitis C virus a leading global cause of liver disease are consistent with the idea that it has circulated for nearly a half a million years HCV may thus have spread worldwide as an intrinsic part of the OutofAfrica migration of modern humans around 150000 years agoThe different genotypes of HCV indigenous to human populations in South and SouthEast Asia and Central Africa may have originated over this prolonged period and this revised timescale may resolve the longstanding riddle of their global distributionsThis story has been sourced from a third party syndicated feed agencies Midday accepts no responsibility or liability for its dependability trustworthiness reliability and data of the text Midday managementmiddaycom reserves the sole right to alter delete or remove without notice the content in its absolute discretion for any reason whatsoever