article_snippet.sent: Professor Mark Pallen, a geneticist at Warwick University who led the work, said: 'By showing that historical strains can be accurately mapped to contemporary lineages, we have confirmed the genotypic continuity of an infection that has ravaged the heart of Europe since prehistoric times.'
article_snippet.sent: Anthropological geneticists Anne Stone of Arizona State University and Johannes Krause of the University of Tubingen in Germany have studied pre-Columbian Mycobacterial tuberculosis genomes.
article_snippet.sent: Anthropological geneticists Anne Stone of Arizona State University and Johannes Krause of the University of Tubingen in Germany examined TB DNA from 1,000-year-old skeletons found in Peru as well as other samples and compared TB DNA to modern genomes.
article_snippet.sent: TB DNA found a clear relationship to TB lineages in animals - especially seals and sea lions.
article_snippet.sent: By analysing the DNA from these bacteria, The researchers were able to trace back the evolutionary history of the different strains
article_snippet.sent: Writing in the journal, The researchers said: 'Phylogenetic dating places the most recent common ancestor of this lineage in the late Roman period. '
article_snippet.sent: The researchers dating is consistent with evidence that a strain containing the pks15/1 deletion was present in Britain by the second–fourth centuries CE.'