Some Vikings may have died from one of humankind's deadliest pathogens: the virus that causes smallpox. Researchers collected DNA from viruses in the remains of northern Europeans living during the Viking Age, some of whom were likely Vikings themselves, and found that these people had been infected with extinct versions of the variola virus that causes smallpox. That finding, reported in the July 24 Science, pushes back the proven record of smallpox infections in people by around 1,000 years, to the year 603.
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