But our team, including researchers at the University of Cambridge and China’s Academy of Social Sciences and Gansu Institute for Cultural Relics and Archaeology, has now found the earliest evidence for the spread of infectious disease organisms along the Silk Road.
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First coming to prominence during the period of the Han Dynasty in China (202 BCE – 220 CE), the Silk Road allowed merchants, explorers, soldiers and officials to travel between East Asia and the Middle East/Eastern Mediterranean.
Egg of a Chinese liver luke found in an ancient toilet, because science.
The Silk Road was riddled with disease after careful analysis of human poo.
The team was lead by biological anthropologists Piers Mitchell and Hui-Yuan Yeh, who used microscopy to analyze personal hygiene sticks discovered in a latrine at a once thriving Silk Road relay station in China to determine that the trade route was used to spread disease.
This is big news, as researchers have previously suggested that other diseases such as bubonic plague, anthrax and leprosy were also transmitted by way of traders on the Silk Road.
We investigated latrines at the Xuanquanzhi relay station, a fortified stopping point along the Silk Road that was built in 111 BC and used until 109 AD.
In addition to parasite-laden feces, researchers also recovered “hygiene sticks” from the ancient latrine – long rods with a piece of cloth tied to one end.
They found eggs from four species of parasitic worm (helminths) were present – roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides), whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), tapeworm (Taenia sp.), and Chinese liver fluke (Clonorchis sinensis) – according to findings published on Friday in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
One of the personal hygiene sticks found at the Xuanquanzhi site.
Discovering evidence for Chinese liver fluke at a latrine in the arid region of Dunhuang was really exciting. “In fact, based on the current prevalence of the Chinese liver fluke, it’s closest endemic area to the latrine’s location in Dunhuang (in north-west China), is around 1,500 kilometres (930 miles) away, and the species is most common in Guandong Province- some 2,000 km from Dunhuang”, the study said.
Today, the Chinese liver fluke’s closest native habitat is almost 1,000 miles from the site of the ancient latrine.
“This may seem surprising”, writes Cambridge researcher and study co-author Piers Mitchell on academic site The Conversation, “but the eggs of many species of intestinal worms are very tough and may survive thousands of years in the ground”.
Given that the Silk Road was a melting pot of people, it is no wonder that researchers have suggested that it might have been responsible for the spread of diseases such as bubonic plague, anthrax and leprosy between China and Europe.
“When I first saw the Chinese liver fluke egg down the microscope I knew that we had made a momentous discovery”, study author Ivy Hui-Yuan Yeh, an infectious disease expert at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, said in a press release. “They could instead have spread between China and Europe via India to the south, or via Mongolia and Russian Federation to the north”, says Mitchell.
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Scientists said the fluke must have traveled an vast distance, and the discovery offered the first solid evidence for long distance travel with an contagious disease along the Silk Road.
