Typhoid Athena 



The Plague of Athens broke out in 430 B.C. 

 Four years later it had killed about a third of 

 the Athenian population, contributing to 

 the great city-state's downfall. The historian 

 Thucydides, who himself suffered and re- 

 covered from the plague, recorded the epi- 

 demic's grim symptoms, which included 

 fever, rash, and diarrhea. Until now, his ac- 

 count provided the only evidence bearing 

 on one of medicine's most controversial 

 enigmas: which disease, exactly, was the 

 plague, and what pathogen caused it? 



Many of the usual nefarious suspects 

 have been brought into the lineup — the 

 causative agents of anthrax, bubonic 

 plague, smallpox, and tuberculosis, among 



N 



Dogs Gone Mild 



Of all domestic animals, dogs have been 

 with people the longest — archaeology says 

 14,000 years, though DNA hints at 40,000 

 years. Artificial selection has led to a multi- 

 tude of breeds with physical and behavioral 

 characteristics suited to specific jobs. Mus- 

 cular, aggressive, fearless terriers, for in- 

 stance, were bred to catch vermin and to 

 fight; robust, sociable sporting dogs were 

 bred to help people re- 

 trieve shot game. But 

 times have changed. 

 Kenth Svartberg, a 

 zoologist at Stockholm 

 University, has shown 

 that modern dogs 

 serve functions rather 

 different from their tra- 

 ditional ones, and their 

 personalities are chang- 

 ing accordingly. 



In Sweden, most 

 dogs are now bred for 

 shows or as family pets, 

 no matter what their 

 breed's original pur- 

 pose. Only a few 

 breeds remain popular 

 in working trials, let alone active on the job. 

 Svartberg rated more than 13,000 Swedish 

 dogs, of thirty-one breeds, for aggressive- 

 ness, curiosity, playfulness, and sociability. A 

 dog's personality, he found, correlated bet- 

 ter with its breed's current use as show dogs 

 or family pets than with its traditional use. In 

 addition, breeds now popular in dog shows, 

 such as pinschers or dalmatians, seem to be 

 losing their character: they scored low on all 



others. Now, Manolis J. Papa- 

 grigorakis, a research dentist at 

 the University of Athens, and 

 three colleagues think they can 

 issue an indictment in the cen- 

 turies-old medical case. 



The investigators studied 

 DNA from dental pulp (the soft 

 tissue inside teeth) of presumed 

 plague victims unearthed from a 

 mass grave in the ancient Ker- 

 ameikos cemetery of Athens. 

 They tried to match genetic 

 sequences to those of several 

 epidemic-causing microorgan- 

 isms. The one they found in the 

 victims' teeth was the bacterium Salmonella 

 Typhi, the germ that causes typhoid fever. 

 In ancient times, typhoid was untreatable; it 

 is transmitted via contaminated food or 

 water. That makes sense, the investigators 

 note. At the time of the plague, Athens, in 

 the throes of the Peloponnesian War with 

 Sparta, was besieged and overcrowded. 

 The overcrowding, together with unsanitary 

 water supplies, might have caused the dis- 

 ease to spread . . . like the plague. (Interna- 

 tional Journal of Infectious Diseases, in 

 press, 2006) 



— Graciela Flores 



Selected, but for what? 



four of Svartberg's scales. In comparison, 

 working breeds, such as border collies, are 

 more aggressive and playful, whereas popu- 

 lar family pet breeds, such as golden retriev- 

 ers, are more playful and sociable. Artificial 

 selection of dogs seems to be ongoing, 

 though, intriguingly, it is pushing the person- 

 alities of show dogs and pets in opposite di- 

 rections. {Applied Animal Behaviour Science 

 96:293-313,2006) — S.R. 



Hippocrates tends the sick and dying in Athens. 



Goat-Getters 



If Neanderthals still walked the earth, 

 they could be excused for developing an 

 inferiority complex. Pop culture, as well as 

 serious anthropology, has saddled them 

 with all kinds of second-rate traits, from 

 clumsiness to sheer stupidity. But Nean- 

 derthals are beginning to find more 

 friends among anthropologists. One study 

 has already debunked the idea that Nean- 

 derthals were clumsy tool-handlers [see 

 "Bones of Contention, " July/August 

 2003). Now a new study by Daniel S. 

 Adler of the University of Connecticut in 

 Storrs and his colleagues suggests that 

 Neanderthals' hunting skills may have 

 been just as good as those of the Homo 

 sapiens that followed. 



Adler and his team analyzed animal 

 bones from a rock shelter in the Repub- 

 lic of Georgia that housed Nean- 

 derthals and then modern humans for 

 some 30,000 years. The study shows 

 that the two societies were equally suc- 

 cessful at hunting prime adult Cau- 

 casian tur, a seasonally abundant spe- 

 cies of mountain goat. 



But Neanderthals' reputations are not 

 completely redeemed. Evidence at the 

 Georgian site suggests both groups ob- 

 tained raw materials such as obsidian 

 from as far as sixty miles away. Modern 

 humans, however, made more frequent 

 forays and had larger territories. Adler's 

 group believes modern humans thus de- 

 veloped larger social networks than Nean- 

 derthals did, perhaps because their com- 

 munications were better. This social 

 advantage enabled them to outcompete 

 their now-extinct cousins. (Current An- 

 thropology 47:89-1 18, 2006) —S.R. 



May 2006 NATURAL HISTORY 



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