You’ve probably heard it before: Europeans brought smallpox to the Americas, devastating Indigenous populations. It was never really a point of serious historical debate. There was plenty of evidence of it in historical records was paired with centuries of research that all pointed to the same grim conclusion.
But according to a new study published in Science, that history just got its strongest proof yet. This time, though, it’s more than just some words written on the paper. It’s Bio biological evidence, and it was found in a pair of mummies found in what we would now consider northern Chile. And it happened by accident.
Researchers originally were looking for human DNA to study ancestry. If they were looking for any illness, it was tuberculosis. They found smallpox instead, or, more specifically, the variola virus, the pathogen behind smallpox. It was buried inside the bones of two indigenous adults buried somewhere between 1492 and 1631.
The viral genomes matched a long-gone strain of smallpox that, chronologically, perfectly fit in between medieval European smallpox and later versions of the disease. In other words, they found a bit of the smallpox virus that was essentially found dead, gripping a boat ticket to the New World.
Ancient Mummy DNA Reveals New Evidence of Smallpox in the Americas
The two victims were likely members of the Inca, the sprawling South American civilization. The pair appeared to have died during the same outbreak. While there were plenty of records indicating the spread of smallpox across indigenous communities, this particular discovery raises some questions about why no historical records mention a smallpox epidemic that far south at that time. The researchers developed their own theory: that the disease quickly tore through indigenous trade routes, eventually reaching places the Spanish never documented.
DNA evidence also gave the researchers a peek into just how deadly this virus was. It had spent centuries mutating itself into a highly efficient killing machine, and then all that dramatically slowed down when it reached indigenous communities with virtually no immunity, because it had nothing to fight against. Its evolution ramped back up once vaccines were introduced in 1796.
The presence of smallpox in the world and its destruction of indigenous peoples was known for quite some time. It was never up for debate. Now, we have a pair of mummies that also preserved a bit of evidence that provides us with a tangible peek into the destruction caused by European colonization.
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