HUMANS All Come FROM AFRICA: HERPES Does Not Lie
26th October 2013
The Register, while normally dealing with tech, sometimes wishes it were the Onion.
Many lotharios will agree that there’s nothing attractive about a cold sore – but the virus behind this common affliction is proving very useful in tracing the migration patterns of early humans.
In fact, boffins have been able to analyse the DNA of the unsightly, lip-borne herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) to shore up the “out of Africa” theory of early human development.
Scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were able to identify 31 different strains of HSV-1 in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. The “stunning” result was that separate strains of the virus could be found on each continent.
This fact allowed the boffins to trace the pattern of human migration by analysing the relatively simple genome of HSV-1, which is significantly less complex than the human gene.