Research provides a new cornerstone of human evolution of malaria

A new biological study shows that malaria has been a threat to human communities for more than 7000 years, earlier than when farming was thought to have begun when it came to destruction.

Lead author Dr Melandri Vlok from the Department of Anatomy, University of Otago, says this groundbreaking research, published today in Scientific Reports, changing the overall understanding of the relationship of humans to malaria, remains one of the deadliest diseases in the world.

“So far we have believed that malaria was a global threat to humans when we turned to farming, but our research shows that in at least South East Asia this disease was a threat to humans. human bodies long before that.

“This research which provides a new cornerstone of human-induced malaria evolution is a major achievement by the entire team,” says Dr. Vlok.

It remains a serious health issue, as of 2019 the World Health Organization reported approximately 229 million cases of malaria worldwide, with 67 percent of malaria deaths in children under 5 years of age.

While malaria is invisible in the archaeological record, the disease has altered the evolutionary history of human bodies and caused visible results in a prehistoric skeleton. Certain genetic mutations can lead to Thalassemia, a devastating genetic disease that in a milder form provides little protection against malaria.

Deep in human history, the genes for malaria have become more common in Southeast Asia and the Minch where it remains a threat, but so far the origin of malaria has not been identified. This research has identified thalassemia in the ancient archaeological site of hunter-gatherers from Vietnam about 7000 years ago, thousands of years before they moved to farming in the area.

In some parts of the world, slowing and burning in agricultural practices would have created pools of dead water attracting mosquitoes carrying malaria, but in Southeast Asia these mosquitoes are carriers. common forest habitation brought people to the disease long before agriculture was adopted.

The Forager study and farmers’ evolutionary changes to malaria as seen in 7000 years of thalassemia in Southeast Asia are the result of combined efforts from years of study by a team of researchers led by Professor Marc Oxenham (the -currently at the University of Aberdeen) and includes researchers from the University of Otago, Australian National University (ANU), James Cook University, Vietnamese Institute of Archeology and Sapporo Medical University.

The research is the first of its kind to use microscopic methods to study changes in bones to identify thalassemia. In 2015, Professor Hallie Buckley from the University of Otago noticed changes in the bones of hunter-gatherers that she suspected thalassemia may have been to blame, but the bones were preserved too badly to be sure. Dr. Buckley summoned the microscopic bone specialist Dr. Justyna Miszkiewicz of ANU to conduct a study. Under the microscope, the ancient Vietnamese specimens showed evidence for unusual porosity revealing modern bone loss problems in thalassemic patients.

At the same time, Dr. Vlok, concluding his doctoral research in Vietnam, discovered changes in the bones excavated in a 4000-year-old agricultural site in the same area as the 7000 hunter-gatherer site. -year. The combined research suggests a long history of evolutionary changes in malaria in Southeast Asia that continues today.

“A lot of pieces came together, then came an interesting moment that malaria was present and a problem for these people years ago, and much earlier than we knew about it so far,” adds Dr Vlok. .