A woman in her thirties and a young man of about 20 died of smallpox in the first decades of Spanish colonization of the Americas. Exhumed decades ago from an Inca cultural site in northern Chile, DNA from the Variola virus has now been found in their remains. This constitutes the oldest evidence of the virus’s presence on American soil. The authors of the discovery, whose findings are published in the journal Science, also show that this lineage had already stopped losing genes. In other words, although of animal origin (zoonotic), it had found in humans its perfect host. The immune systems of Indigenous people, unable to confront the new disease, may have helped this maturation process. The analysis rules out the presence of the virus in the Americas before colonization.
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