Friends, Romans And DNA

Until Mussolini drained the mosquito-infested marshes south of Rome in the 1930s, malaria struck the city with such deadly regularity each summer that it was called the Roman fever. Last week two British scientists said they have found what may be the first genetic evidence that the killer disease was a blight on life in ancient Rome as well.

The evidence comes from the leg bone of a three-year-old child buried in a cemetery 70 miles north of Rome in the empire's waning days, circa A.D. 450. The remains were among some four dozen small skeletons--mostly of infants or stillbirths--excavated there in the early 1990s by University of Arizona archaeologist David Soren and colleagues. Because so many of the babies were preemies, and all seem to have been interred at about the same time, Soren suspected a malaria epidemic.

Using bone samples from five children, Robert Sallares, a research fellow at the University of Manchester in England, succeeded in obtaining snatches of malarial DNA from just one skeleton. The 1,500-year-old DNA matched that of P. falciparum, the most virulent form of malaria.

Though the technique may help unravel ancient medical riddles, Sallares isn't claiming it has explained why Rome fell. While malaria is debilitating and people would have done less work, he says, "they would have moved to the hilltops because mosquitoes don't like to climb mountains."