Virutologists from Oxford University found out that the Coronavirus referring to which SARS-COV-2 belongs to the epidemics of tens of thousands of years ago, transfers Gazeta.ru.
Despite the rapid pace of evolution, the need to be able to infect the owners imposes serious restrictions on the development of viruses. Researchers recreated the Evolution of SARS-COV-2, taking into account these restrictions. It turned out that the last general ancestor SARS-COV-2 and SARS-COV-1 existed more than 21 thousand years ago, which is 30 times more than previous estimates. Also, these data are consistent with the results of analyzing the genomic data of ancient people – about 21 thousand years ago, people have already suffered from the coronavirus epidemic.
The authors of the work published in the magazine Current Biology are calculated that they will be able to reconstruct evolutionary changes and other viruses. So, they have already found that the hepatitis C virus obviously circulated among animals to half a million years ago, and about 150 thousand years ago spread among people during migration from Africa.