A recent study found evidence that an ancient coronavirus may have infected the ancestors of the people of modern East Asia about 25,000 years ago and continued for thousands of years afterward, according to a report by LiveScience.
The study's principal supervisor, David Enard, assistant professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Arizona, said humans have been at risk of viruses for thousands of years.
He added: "the virus is one of the main drivers of natural selection in the human genome", which means that genes capable of surviving humans from pathogens are more likely to transition to the new generations.
Through modern technologies, scientists have been able to identify ancient pathogens, which helps predict future epidemics, according to the scientist who said that "things that happened a lot in the past are likely to happen again in the future."
The report suggests that genes that characterize proteins of human cells that deal with viruses mutate, and this mutation may help the work of viruses, but if the gene gives a better ability to fight the virus, it will have a better chance of being passed on to future generations.
The researchers found that in people of East Asian descent, the "selection" of certain genes known to interact with coronavirus occurred.
Over time, some mutations appeared more frequently than would be expected to happen by chance, and it is possible that this group of mutations helped the ancestors of this group of humans become more resistant to the ancient virus by altering the amount of these proteins made by the cells.
The researchers found that the genetic mutations of 42 of the 420 proteins they analyzed were repeated about 25, 000 years ago, and the mutations continued to spread even about five thousand years ago, suggesting that the ancient virus continued to threaten these populations for a long time.
Joel Wertheim, associate professor in the UCLA Department of Medicine, said that "viruses exert some of the strongest selective pressures on humans to adapt, and it is assumed that coronavirus existed long before humans existed."
But he also stressed the difficulty of determining whether or not the virus that caused this development was coronavirus "but it seems like a reasonable working theory".
The ancient disease that plagued our ancestors may not have been coronavirus, but another type of virus reacted in the same way that coronaviruses did, Enard said.
But other researchers have found a group of viruses including coronavirus that first evolved 23,500 years ago, coinciding with that era, according to LiveScience.
Enard and his team hope to collaborate with virologists to understand how these mutations helped ancient humans survive this primitive coronavirus.
The team also hopes to eventually use older genome studies as an" early warning system " for future epidemics.