I predict that a lot of disease cures will be discovered in the very near future. It’s an exciting time to be a scientist. There is a relatively new field of study called Evolutionary Medicine that looks at why we get sick and where our susceptibility to certain diseases come from.
I first heard about Evolutionary Medicine the same way I learn about many of the fascinating things that I blog about. I was commuting to work and listening to NPR. There is a show that I particularly enjoy called The Daily (which should not be confused with the Daily Show, although I enjoy Jon Stewart, too.) You can also listen to The Daily as a podcast, and I highly recommend that you do.
The Daily is a show that comes from the New York Times. It basically discusses one of that paper’s most fascinating stories of the day. On the day in question, it was a show entitled, “Is the Future of Medicine Hidden in Ancient DNA?”
Ancient peoples and ancestry are two of my passions, so I was engrossed. Most of my information about Evolutionary Medicine comes from that particular podcast, so I apologize in advance for my overly simplistic and probably error-ridden description of the field. In my own defense, I listened to that podcast again before writing this post. It’s not like I could take notes while I was driving, after all. Still, I’m no expert in any of this. But you’re a smart cookie, Dear Reader, so I’m guessing that you can do further research on the topic if you’re really intrigued.
Okay, let’s start off by describing the Yamnaya People. I had never heard of them before, have you? It always excites me when I stumble upon something new to learn more about.
The Yamnaya existed between 3300 – 2600 BCE. That’s the late Copper, early Bronze Age. They get their name from the Russian word for pit graves, because that’s the way these people buried their dead. They originated in what is now Ukraine, but they were traditionally herders of livestock, so they got around. That’s putting it mildly. You might say that the Yamnaya people put the “mad” in nomadic.
We find traces of the Yamnaya in Ukraine, Russia, Hungary Kazakhstan, Siberia, Turkey, Moldova, Bulgaria, India, Pakistan, even as far away as Denmark, Spain and Italy. (They seem to have particularly liked Finland.) Wherever they went, they tended to take over.
If you have any ancestry from Central or Northern Europe or Central Asia, it’s very likely that you are descended from the Yamnaya. They may have brought the Proto-Indian languages to Europe. They also brought us the gene for lactose tolerance, so if you enjoy milk or yogurt, you have them to thank.
The Yamnaya used two-wheeled carts and four-wheeled wagons to carry their possessions. They may also have been one of the first horse-riding people. It’s quite plausible that they created the first intercontinental trade routes.
So what does this have to do with Evolutionary Medicine? We are now able to efficiently extract DNA not only from bronze age skeletons, but even, occasionally, from the very germs that killed these people. We are also learning how to pinpoint what parts of the genetic sequence put you at risk for various diseases. So, to grossly oversimplify, we can now theorize which of these diseases were brought to us by the Yamnaya.
Have you ever wondered why diseases keep getting passed down from generation to generation? I mean, you’d think people with diseases would be less likely to have offspring, so eventually, the disease should die out, right? Wrong.
What scientists are discovering is that some of the genetic anomalies that cause diseases in us may have been the very thing that kept the Yamnaya alive. These people lived very closely with the animals they herded. As we know, animals can carry a lot of things that humans can catch. So the Yamnaya, over time, developed extremely aggressive immune responses. Great for them, but not so great for us.
A lot of the pathogens that the Yamnaya people had to build immunities against no longer exist in the modern world. But our immune system doesn’t know that. It wants to do its job! Where is the enemy? Well, in the absence of those pathogens, our immune system has chosen to attack us. And that shows up in a whole host of diseases, such as Multiple Sclerosis.
So what to do? Well, if we can mimic those pathogens, perhaps our bodies will stop turning on us and instead attack those mimics. It’s possible that by studying various populations and tracking down the origins of genetic anomalies and what benefit they originally provided, someday we’ll be able to treat not only Multiple Sclerosis, but also things like heart disease, diabetes, and schizophrenia.
Isn’t that incredible? Our past might secure our future. We are living in exiting times. I wonder what the world will be like 50 years from now. I won’t be around to see it, but I have high hopes for the younger generations, assuming that humans haven’t global warmed themselves to death by then.
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