Ancient Skeleton (IMAGE)

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Ancient Skeleton

Caption

The skeleton of a woman who died 800 years ago on the outskirts of the ancient city of Troy in modern Turkey has yielded the first record of maternal sepsis in the fossil record. DNA locked inside the calcified nodules, found at the base of the chest and extracted by researchers, yielded the complete genomes of the pathogenic bacteria likely responsible for the woman's death.

Credit

Gebhard Bieg

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