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A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

nytimes.com

31–40 of 177 posts

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#31

So - how did this virus spread through the population? 20 kyrs ago people didn't live in cities but in small bands of a few dozen people. It's easy to see how an epidemic might spread through a village but how would it move between isolated groups?

They were less "isolated" than you imagine. They traded with each other, intermarried, fought wars. You can see that in populations having a similar life style nowadays (there's very few of them now).

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#32

People keep posting archive links to "non-paywalled" copies, but the study itself has freely available full-text not behind a paywall. No need to read the NY Times at all. Just go straight to the source: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...

Even better: The data is readily available in the world! All you need to do is a bit of research and travelling and you could come to a similar conclusion!

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groups interacted with each other. A large reason that humans are found more or less everywhere on the planet was pressure from interacting with other humans.

They absolutely did but how frequently? The first villages in China are attested 7500 BCE, that's 10 kyr later, if the dating is correct.

As far as I am aware, large meetings of different tribes did occur during the paleolithic at regular intervals, although not very frequently. In any case, such meetings don't have to be frequent for such a virus to spread once they do occur. The virus could have originated in a single tribe, killing some of the people and immunising others and then remained endemic in that tribe for years before they came into contact with others.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#34
post #20

Aren't coronaviruses pretty common...?

Yes. They've also caused three major epidemics in the past two decades - there's no reason they shouldn't have emerged historically from time to time.

So, a likely scenario is: a new virus appeared, it swept through the population, caused serious disease, a bunch of people died, the survivors had better resistance to it, it settled as a mostly innocuous thing (such as the common cold) or disappeared completely, and the next generations remembered it as "the plague of emperor Fancy Pants" or something.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#35

People keep posting archive links to "non-paywalled" copies, but the study itself has freely available full-text not behind a paywall. No need to read the NY Times at all. Just go straight to the source: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...

I’d personally rather read the NYT article because it’s much easier to understand as a layman

I prefer just the opposite, even if the jargon is harder to consume at a glance, the extra layer of editorializing can obfuscate central facts or salience peripheral details based on whatever their target demographic wants to hear (nothing exclusive to NYT).

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#36
post #9

> The finding could have dire implications for the Covid-19 pandemic if it’s not brought under control soon through vaccination. > “What is going on right now might be going on for generations and generations.” > Covid-19, SARS and MERS. Studies on each of these coronaviruses indicate that they jumped into our species from bats or other mammals. Hard to take seriously an article having such an obvious agenda.

Agenda of science - how dare they talk about vaccines or viruses jumping between spices. I read on Facebook while I was pooping, that vaccines are evil and don't work, and viruses only exists in our world, because people are engineering them! That's the truth, that has no agenda behind it! /s

Geez. Taking the parent post in horrible faith, really unfortunate to see on this platform. All the parent did was point out a few comments from the piece which certainly add a tinge of bias - stating with certainty that Covid was not lab-made for one.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#37
post #30
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

calling out stupidity is not censorship. Removing stupidity from a conversation on a private website is not censorship. discussing 'agenda' is not a neutral comment or a meaningful contribution to discourse on this topic, it is stupidity.

the idea that the universe started from an arbitrarily small size and expanded was once considered stupidity. the idea that Iraq might not have WMD was once considered stupidity (even by those on the left). "BUT THE UN INSPECTORS SAID SO!" The idea that we might want to wear masks to protect ourselves in crowded public places was considered stupidity. "THE WHO SAID MASKS DONT WORK! FOUCI SAID!" calling something stup…

If by "agenda" you mean this:

> dire implications for the Covid-19 pandemic if it’s not brought under control soon through vaccination

then I propose a different target for the head-check.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#38

People keep posting archive links to "non-paywalled" copies, but the study itself has freely available full-text not behind a paywall. No need to read the NY Times at all. Just go straight to the source: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(21)...

Here is the source code, AFAICT: https://github.com/DavidPierreEnard/Gene_Set_Enrichment_Pipe...

I've been involved in GWAS before, so have an inkling of what's going on. I love the creativity in this paper.

The stuff is super fascinating, but the pipelines are still very primitive—so I encourage programmers to get involved in bioinformatics if you like this stuff! In the future I expect we see work like this accompanied by not only source code but Spore like simulations that let you explore the ideas like a video game.

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Groups interacted with each other. A large reason that humans are found more or less everywhere on the planet was pressure from interacting with other humans.

They absolutely did but how frequently? The first villages in China are attested 7500 BCE, that's 10 kyr later, if the dating is correct.

> They absolutely did but how frequently? The first villages in China are attested 7500 BCE, that's 10 kyr later, if the dating is correct.

There were obviously viruses before urbanization (especially given there are viruses that spread in wild animal populations), they probably just spread more slowly. At the minimum, there was probably regular deliberate contact/mixing between adjacent groups to avoid too much inbreeding, and that would imply other social contacts (e.g. an adult who married into another group returning home to catch up with his/her parents and old friends).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission%E2%80%93fusion_society...

Re: A coronavirus epidemic hit 20k years ago, new study finds

#40
post #25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wow, this is where hackernews has come. All the user stated was "its hard to take the article seriously with such an obvious agenda", something along those lines. and the community thought that was flaggable? this is where we come? welcome to the great censorship. Believe in all that is holy from a political left, and disbelievers shall be punished and removed from conversation. If you can't see agenda painting in th…

I wasn't one of the flaggers, but the comment was pretty insubstantial and somewhat inflammatory; I am 0 percent surprised it got flagged. Edit: every article put on the internet has an agenda. From pushing for vaccines to making the author money to spreading valuable technical information. "Having an agenda" is not cause to not take an article seriously.

If a scientist comes out with a research finding, and you then find out X Corp was backing them, you’d change your confidence on the trustworthiness of the research done. Similar to any op-ed, understanding bias is valuable, and calling out bias with good reasons is useful for the unaware.
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